Pattern Of Culture

PATTERNS OF CULTURE

PATTERNS
OF CULTURE

RUTH BENEDICT

Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd
Broadway House, Carter Lane
London, EO4V 5EL

First published 1935
by Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd
Broadway House, 68--74 Carter Lane
London, EC 4V 5EL

Reprinted five times

Reprinted and first published
as a Routledge Paperback 1961
Reprinted 1963, 1965, 1968, 1971

ISBN o 7100 1070 J2 (c)
ISBN o 7100 4618 9 (p)

In the beginning God gave to every people a cup
of clay, and from this cup they drank their life.

Proverb of Digger Indians*

Printed m Great Britain
by Photolithography
Unwin Brothers Limited
Woking and London

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The three primitive peoples described in this volume have been
chosen because knowledge of these tribes is comparatively full and
satisfactory and because I was able to supplement published
descriptions with many discussions with the field ethnologists who
have lived intimately with these peoples and who have written
the authoritative descriptions of the tribes in question. I have
myself lived several summers in the pueblo of Zuni, and among
some of the neighbouring tribes which I have used to contrast
with pueblo culture. I owe a great debt to Dr. Ruth L. Bunzel,
who learned the Zuni language and whose accounts of Zuni and
collections of texts are the best of all the available pueblo studies.
For the description of Dobu I am indebted to Dr. Reo F. Fortune’s
invaluable monograph, The Sorcerers of Dobu^ and to many delight-
ful conversations. For the North-West Coast of America I have
used not only Professor Franz Boas’s text publications and detailed
compilations of Kwakiutl life, but his still unpublished material
and his penetrating comment upon his experience on the North-
West Coast extending over forty years.

For the presentations here I am alone responsible and it may
be that I have carried some interpretations further than one or
another of the field-workers would have done. But the chapters
have been read and verified as to facts by these authorities upon
these tribes, and references to their detailed studies are given for
those who wish to consult the full accounts.

I wish to make grateful acknowledgment to the original
publishers for permission to reprint certain paragraphs from the
following articles : The Science of Custom ”, in The Century
Magazine ; Configurations of Culture in North America ”, in
The American Anthropologist ; and “ Anthropology and the
Abnormal ”, in The Journal of General Psychology.

Thanks are due also to E. P. Dutton & Company, publishers
of Sorcerers of Dobu.

Columbia University,
New York City

RUTH BENEDICT

CONTENTS

PAGE

Introduction ix

CHAP

I The Science of Custom . . . i

Custom and behaviour — ^The child’s inheritance — Our false
perspective — Confusion of local custom with “ Human Nature ” —

Our blindness to other cultures — Race-prejudice — Man moulded
by custom, not instinct — “ Racial purity ” a delusion — Reason for
studying primitive peoples

II. The Diversity of Cultures 15

The cup of life — The necessity for selection — Adolescence and
puberty as treated m different societies — Peoples who never heard
of war — Marriage customs — Interweaving of cultural traits —
Guardian spirits and visions — Marriage and the Church — These
associations social, not biologically inevitable

III The Integration of Culture . ... 32

All standards of behaviour relative — Patterning of culture — ^Weak-
ness of most anthropological work — The view of the whole —
Spengler’s “ Decline of the West ” — Faustian and Apollonian man —
Western civilization too intricate for study — ^A ddtour via primitive
tribes

IV. The Pueblos of New Mexico 41

An unspoiled cominunity — Zuni ceremonial — Priests and masked
gods — Medicine societies — strongly socialized culture — “ The
middle road ” — Carrying farther the Greek ideal — Contrastmg
customs of the Plains Indians — Dionysian frenzies and visions —

Drugs and alcohol — The Zuhi’s distrust of excess — Scorn for power
and violence — Marriage, death, and mourning — ^Fertility cere-
monies — Sex symbolism — Man’s oneness with the universe ” —

The typical Apollonian civilization

V. Dobu . . . 94

Where ill-will and treachery are virtues— -Traditional hostility —
Trapping the bridegroom — The humiliating position of the husband
—Fierce exclusiveness of ownership — Reliance on magic — Ritual of
the garden — Disease-charms and sorcerers — Passion for commerce —
Wabuwabu, a sharp trade practice — Death — Mutual recriminations
among survivors — Laughter excluded — ^Prudery — A cut-throat
struggle

VI. The North-West Coast of America . 125

A sea-coast civilization — ^The Kwakiutl of Vancouver Island —
Typical Dionysians — Cannibal Society — ^At the opposite pole from
the Pueblos — The economic contest — ^A parody on our own society —
Self-glorification — Shaming one’s guests — Potlatch exchanges —
Heights of bravado — Investing m a bnde — Prerogatives through
marriage, murder, and religion — Shamanism — Fear of ridicule —
Death, the paramount affront — ^Thc gamut of emotions,
vii

Viil CONTENTS

CHAP.

VII The Nature of Society ....

Integration and assimilation — Conflict of inharmonious elements —
Our own complex society — The organism v the individual — The
cultural V the biological interpretation — ^Applying the lesson of
primitive tribes — ^No fixed “ types ” — Significance of diffusion and
^cultural configuration — Social values — Need for self-appraisal

VIILi The Individual and the Pattern of Culture .

Society and individual not antagonistic but interdependent —
Ready adaptation to a pattern — Reactions to frustration — Stnkmg
cases of maladjustment — ^Acceptance of homosexuals — Trance and
catalepsy as means to authority — The place of the “ misfit ” in
society — Possibilities of tolerance — Extreme representatives of a
cultural type Puritan divines and successful modern egoists —
Social relativity a doctrine of hope, not despair

References ... ... . .

Index . ....

PAGE

l6l

i8i

202

208

INTRODUCTION

During the present century many new approaches to the
problems of social anthropology have developed. The old
method of constructing a history of human culture based on bits
of evidence, torn out of their natural contacts, and collected from
all times and all parts of the world, has lost much of its hold. It
was followed by a period of painstaking attempts at reconstruction
of historical connections based on studies of distribution of special
features and supplemented by archaeological evidence. Wider and
wider areas were looked upon from this viewpoint. Attempts
were made to establish firm connections between various cultural
features and these were used to establish wider historical con-
nections. The possibility of independent development of
analogous cultural features which is a postulate of a general
history of culture has been denied or at least consigned to an
inconsequential role. Both the evolutionary method and the
analysis of independent local cultures were devoted to unravelling
the sequences of cultural forms. While by means of the former it
was hoped to build up. a unified picture of the history of culture
and civilization, the adherents of the latter method, at least
among its more conservative adherents, saw each culture as a
single unit and as an individual historical problem.

Under the influence of the intensive analysis of cultures the
indispensable collection of facts relating to cultural forms has
received a strong stimulus. The material so collected gave us
information on social life, as though it consisted of strictly
separated categories, such as economic life, technology, art, social
organization, religion, and the unifying bond was difficult to find.
The position of the anthropologist seemed like that satirized by
Goethe :

Wer will was Lebendig’s erkennen und beschreiben,

Sucht erst den Geist heraus zu treiben,

Dann hat er die Teile in seiner Hand,

Fehlt leider nur das geistige Band.

The occupation with living cultures has created a stronger
interest in the totality of each culture. It is felt more and more
that hardly any trait of culture can be understood when taken
out of its general setting. The attempt to conceive a whole
culture as controlled by a single set of conditions did not solve the

ix

X

INTRODUCTION

problem. The purely anthropo-geographical, economic, or in
other ways formalistic approach seemed to give distorted pictures.

The desire to grasp the meaning of a culture as a whole
compels us to consider descriptions of standardized behaviour
merely as a stepping-stone leading to other problems. We must
understand the individual as living in his culture ; and the culture
as lived by individuals. The interest in these socio-psychological
problems is not in any way opposed to the historical approach.
On the contrary, it reveals dynamic processes that have been
active in cultural changes and enables us to evaluate evidence
obtained from the detailed comparison of related cultures.

On account of the character of the material the problem of
cultural life presents itself often as that of the interrelation
between various aspects of culture. In some cases this study
leads to a better appreciation of the intensity or lack of integra-
tion of a culture. It brings out clearly the forms of integration
in various types of culture which prove that the relations between
different aspects of culture follow the most diverse patterns and do
not lend themselves profitably to generalizations. However, it
leads rarely, and only indirectly, to an understanding of the
relation between individual and culture.

This requires a deep penetration into the genius of the culture,
a knowledge of the attitudes controlling individual and group
behaviour. Dr. Benedict calls the genius of culture its configura-
tion. In the present volume the author has set before us this
problem and has illustrated it by the example of three cultures
that are permeated each by one dominating idea. This treat-
ment is distinct from the so-called functional approach to social
phenomena in so far as it is concerned rather with the discovery
of fundamental attitudes than with the functional relations of
every cultural item. It is not historical except in so far as the
general configuration, as long as it lasts, limits the directions of
change that remain subject to it. In comparison to changes of
content of culture the configuration has often remarkable
permanency.

As the author points out, not every culture is characterized by
a dominant character, but it seems probable that the more
intimate our knowledge of the cultural drives that actuate the
behaviour of the individual, the more we shall find that certain
controls of emotion, certain ideals of conduct, prevail that account
for what seem to us abnormal attitudes when viewed from the
standpoint of our civilization. The relativity of what is con-

INTRODUCTION

XI

sidered social or asocial, normal or abnormal, is seen in a new
light.

The extreme cases selected by the author make clear the
importance of the problem.

FRANZ BOAS.

PATTERNS OF CULTURE

Chapter I

THE SCIENCE OF CUSTOM

Anthropology is the study of human beings as creatures
of society. It fastens its attention upon those physical char-
acteristics and industrial techniques, those conventions and
values, which distinguish one community from all others that
belong to a different tradition.

The distinguishing mark of anthropology among the social
sciences is that it includes for serious study other societies than
our own. For its purposes any social regulation of mating and
reproduction is as significant as our own, though it may be that
of the Sea Dyaks, and have no possible historical relation to
that of our civilization. To the anthropologist, our customs and
those of a New Guinea tribe are two possible social schemes for
dealing with a common problem, and in so far as he remains
an anthropologist he is bound to avoid any weighting of one
in favour of the other. He is interested in human behaviour,
not as it is shaped by one tradition, our own, but as it has been
shaped by any tradition whatsoever. He is interested in the
great gamut of custom that is found in various cultures, and
his object is to understand the way in which these cultures
change and differentiate, the different forms through which they
express themselves, and the manner in which the customs of any
peoples function in the lives of the individuals who compose
them.

Now custom has not been commonly regarded as a subject
of any great moment. The inner workings of our own brains
we feel to be uniquely worthy of investigation, but custom, we
have a way of thinking, is behaviour at its most commonplace.
As a matter of fact, it is the other way round. Traditional
custom, taken the world over, is a mass of detailed behaviour
more astonishing than what any one person can ever evolve in
individual actions no matter how aberrant. Yet that is a rather
trivial aspect of the matter. The fact of first-rate importance

I

2

PATTERNS OF CULTURE

is the predominant role that custom plays in experience and in
belief, and the very great vaneties it may manifest.

No man ever looks at the world with pristine eyes. He
sees it edited by a definite set of customs and institutions and
ways of thinking. Even in his philosophical probings he cannot
go behind these stereotypes ; his very concepts of the true and
the false will still have reference to his particular traditional
customs. John Dewey has said in all seriousness that the part
played by custom in shaping the behaviour of the individual as
over against any way in which he can affect traditional custom,
is as the proportion of the total vocabulary of his mother tongue
over against those words of his own baby talk that are taken up
into the vernacular of his family. When one seriously studies
social orders that have had the opportunity to develop autono-
mously, the figure becomes no more than an exact and matter-
of-fact observation. The hfe-history of the individual is first
and foremost an accommodation to the patterns and standards
traditionally handed down in his community. From the moment
of his birth the customs into which he is born shape his experience
and behaviour. By the time he can talk, he is the little creature
of his culture, and by the time he is grown and able to take
part in its activities, its habits are his habits, its beliefs his beliefs,
its impossibilities his impossibilities. Every child that is born
into his group will share them with him, and no child born
into one on the opposite side of the globe can ever achieve the
thousandth part. There is no social problem it is more incum-
bent upon us to understand than this of the r 61 e of custom.
Until we are intelligent as to its laws and varieties, the main
complicating facts of human life must remain unintelligible.

The study of custom can be profitable only after certain
prehminary propositions have been accepted, and some of these
propositions have been violently opposed. In the first place
any scientific study requires that there be no preferential weight-
ing of one or another of the items in the series it selects for its
consideration. In all the less controversial fields like the study
of cacti or termites or the nature of nebulae, the necessary method
of study is to group the relevant material and to take note of
all possible variant forms and conditions. In this way we have
leaiTted all that we know of the laws of astronomy, or of the
habits of the social insects, let us say. It is only in the study
of man himself that the major social sciences have substituted
the study of one local variation, that of Western civilization.

THE SCIENCE OF CUSTOM

3

Anthropology was by definition impossible as long as these
distinctions between ourselves and the primitive, ourselves and
the barbarian, ourselves and the pagan, held sway over people’s
minds. It was necessary first to arrive at that degree of sophis-
tication where we no longer set our own belief over against our
neighbour’s superstition. It was necessary to recognize that
those institutions which are based on the same premises, let us
say the supernatural, must be considered together, our own
among the rest.

In the first half of the nineteenth century this elementary
postulate of anthropology could not occur to the most enlightened
person of Western civilization. Man, all down his history, has
defended his uniqueness like a point of honour. In Copernicus’
time this claim to supremacy was so inclusive that it took in
even the earth on which we live, and the fourteenth century
refused with passion to have this planet subordinated to a place
in the solar scheme. By Darwin’s time, having granted the solar
system to the enemy, man fought with all the weapons at his
command for the uniqueness of the soul, an unknowable attribute
given by God to man in such a manner that it disproved man’s
ancestry in the animal kingdom. No lack of continuity in the
argument, no doubts of the nature of this soul ”, not even the
fact that the nineteenth century did not care in the least to
defend its brotherhood with any group of aliens — none of these
facts counted against the first-rate excitement that raged on
account of the indignity evolution proposed against the notion of
man’s uniqueness.

Both these battles we may fairly count as won — ^if not yet,
then soon ; but the fighting has only massed itself upon another
front. We are quite willing to admit now that the revolution
of the earth about the sun, or the animal ancestry of man,
has next to nothing to do with the uniqueness of our human
achievements. If we inhabit one chance planet out of a myriad
solar systems, so much the greater glory, and if all the ill-assorted
human races are linked by evolution with the animal, the
provable differences between ourselves and them are the more
extreme and the uniqueness of our institutions the more remark-
able. But OUT achievements, our institutions are unique ; they
are of a different order from those of lesser races and must be
protected at all costs. So that to-day, whether it is a question
of imperialism, or of race prejudice, or of a comparison between
Christianity and paganism, we are still preoccupied with the

PATTERNS OF CULTURE

4

uniqueness, not of the human institutions of the world at large,
which no one has ever cared about anyway, but of our own
institutions and achievements, our own civilization.

Western civilization, because of fortuitous Historical circum-
stances, has spread itself more widely than any other local group
that has so far been known. It has standardized itself over
most of the globe, and we have been led, therefore, to accept
a belief in the uniformity of human behaviour that under other
circumstances would not have arisen. Even very primitive
peoples are sometimes far more conscious of the role of cultural
traits than we are, and for good reason. They have had inti-
mate experience of different cultures. They have seen their
rehgion, their economic system, their marriage prohibitions, go
down before the white man’s. They have laid down the one
and accepted the other, often uncomprehendingly enough, but
they are quite clear that there are variant arrangements of
human life. They will sometimes attribute dominant char-
acteristics of the white man to his commercial competition,
or to his institution of warfare, very much in the fashion of the
anthropologist.

The white man has had a different experience. He has
never seen an outsider, perhaps, unless the outsider has been
already Europeanized. If he has travelled, he has very likely
been around the world without ever staying outside a cosmo-
politan hotel. He knows little of any ways of life but his own.
The uniformity of custom, of outlook, that he sees spread about
him, seems convincing enough, and conceals from him the fact
that It is after all an historical accident. He accepts without
more ado the equivalence of human nature and his own cultural
standards.

Yet the great spread of white civilization is not an isolated
historical circumstance. The Polynesian group, in compara-
tively recent times, has spread itself from Ontong, Java, to Easter
Island, from Hawaii to New Zealand, and the Bantu-speaking
tribes spread from the Sahara to southern Africa. But in neither
case do we regard these peoples as more than an overgrown local
variation of the human species. Western civilization has had
all its inventions in transportation and aU its far-flung com-
mercial arrangements to back up its great dispersion, and it is
easy to understand historically how this came about.

The psychological consequences of this spread of white culture
have been out of all proportion to the materialistic. This world-

THE SCIENCE OF CUSTOM 5

wide cultural diffusion has protected us as man had never been
protected before from having to take seriously the civilizations of
other peoples ; it has given to our culture a massive universality
that we have long ceased to account for historically, and which
we read off rather as necessary and inevitable. We interpret
our dependence, in our civilization, upon economic competition,
as proof that this is the prime motivation that human nature
can rely upon, or we read off the behaviour of small children
as it is moulded in our civilization and recorded in child climes,
as child psychology or the way in which the young human
animal is bound to behave. It is the same whether it is a ques-
tion of our ethics or of our family organization. It is the inevit-
ability of each familiar motivation that we defend, attempting
always to identify our own local ways of behaving with Be-
haviour, or our own socialized habits with Human Nature.

Now modern man has made this thesis one of the living
issues in his thought and in his practical behaviour, but the
sources of it go far back into what appears to be, from its universal
distribution among primitive peoples, one of the earliest of
human distinctions, the difference in kind between “ my own ’’
closed group and the outsider. All primitive tribes agree in
recognizing this category of the outsiders, those who are not
only outside the provisions of the moral code which holds within
the limits of one’s own people, but who are summarily denied a
place anywhere in the human scheme. A great number of the
tribal names in common use, Zuhi, Dene, Kiowa, and the rest,
are names by which primitive peoples know themselves, and
are only their native terms for ‘‘ the human beings ”, that is,
themselves. Outside of the closed group there are no human
beings. And this is in spite of the fact that from an objective
point of view each tribe is surrounded by peoples sharing in its
arts and material inventions^ in elaborate practices that have
grown up by a mutual give-and-take of behaviour from one
people to another.

Primitive man never looked out over the world and saw
“ mankind ” as a group and felt his common cause with his
species. From the beginning he was a provincial who raised
the barriers high. Whether it was a question of choosing a
wife or of taking a head, the first and important distinction was
between his own human group and those beyond the pale. His
own group, and all its ways of behaving, was unique.

So modern man, differentiating into Chosen People and

6

PATTERNS OF CULTURE

dangerous aliens, groups within his own civilization genetically
and culturally related to one another as any tribes in the Aus-
trahan bush are among themselves, has the justification of a
vast historical continuity behind his attitude. The Pygmies have
made the same claims. We are not likely to clear ourselves
easily of so fundamental a human trait, but we can at least
learn to recognize its history and its hydra manifestations.

One of these manifestations, and one which is often spoken
of as primary and motivated rather by religious emotions than
by this more generalized provincialism, is the attitude that has
universally held in Western civilizations so long as religion
remained a living issue among them. The distinction between
any closed group and outside peoples becomes, m terms of
religion, that between the true believers and the heathen. Be-
tween these two categones for thousands of years there were no
common meeting-points. No ideas or institutions that held in
the one were valid in the other. Rather all institutions were
seen in opposing terms according as they belonged to one or the
other of the very often slightly diflferentiated religions • on the
one side it was a question of Divine Truth and the true believer,
of revelation and of God ; on the other it was a matter of mortal
error, of fables, of the damned and of devils. There could be
no question of equating the attitudes of the opposed groups and
hence no question of understanding from objectively studied data
the nature of this important human trait, religion.

We feel a justified superiority when we read a description
such 8is this of the standard religious attitude. At least we have
thrown off that particular absurdity, and we have accepted the
study of comparative religion. But considering the scope a
similar attitude has had in our civilization in the form of race
prejudices, for example, we are justified in a little scepticism as
to whether our sophistication in the matter of religion is due to
the fact that we have outgrown naive childishness, or simply to
the fact that religion is no longer the area of life in which the
important modern battles are staged. In the really live issues of
our civilization we seem to be far from having gained the detach-
ment that we have so largely achieved in the field of religion.

There is another circumstance that has made the serious
study of custom a late and often a half-heartedly pursued dis-
ciphne, and 'it is a difficulty harder to surmount than those of
which we have just spoken. Custom did not challenge the
attention of social theorists because it was the very stuff of their

THE SCIENCE OF CUSTOM 7

own thinking : it was the lens without which they could not
see at all. Precisely in proportion as it was fundamental, it
had its existence outside the field of conscious attention. There
IS nothing mystical about this blindness. When a student has
assembled the vast data for a study of international credits, or of
the process of learning, or of narcissism as a factor in psycho-
neuroses, it is through and in this body of data that the economist
or the psychologist or the psychiatrist operates. He does not
reckon with the fact of other social arrangements where all the
factors, it may be, are differently arranged. He does not reckon,
that is, with cultural conditioning. He sees the trait he is
studying as having known and inevitable manifestations, and he
projects these as absolute because they are all the materials he
has to think with. He identifies local attitudes of the 1930’s
with Human Nature, the description of them with Economics
or Psychology.

Practically, it often does not matter. Our children must be
educated in our pedagogical tradition, and the study of the
process of learning in our schools is of paramount importance.
There is the same kind of justification for the shrug of the shoulders
with which we often greet a discussion of other economic systems.
After all, we must live within the framework of mine and thine
that our own culture institutionalizes.

That is true, and the fact that the varieties of culture can
best be discussed as they exist in space gives colour to our non-
chalance. But it is only limitation of historical material that
prevents examples from being drawn rather from the succession of
cultures in time. That succession we cannot escape if we would,
and when we look back even a generation we realize the extent
to which revision has taken place, sometimes in our most intimate
behaviour* So far these revisions have been blind, the result
of circumstances we can chart only in retrospect. Except for
our unwillingness to face cultural change in intimate matters
until it is forced upon us, it would not be impossible to take a
more intelligent and directive attitude. The resistance is in large
measure a result of our misunderstanding of cultural conventions,
and especially an exaltation of those that happen to belong to
our nation and decade. A very little acquaintance with other
conventions, and a knowledge of how various these may be,
would do much to promote a rational social order.

The study of different cultures has another important bearing
upon present-day thought and behaviour. Modern existence has

PATTERNS OF CULTURE

8

thrown many civilizations into close contact, and at the moment
the overwhelming response to this situation is nationalism and
racial snobbery. There has never been a time when civilization
stood more in need of individuals who are genuinely culture-
conscious, who can see objectively the socially conditioned
behaviour of other peoples without fear and recrimination.

Contempt for the alien is not the only possible solution of
our present contact of races and nationalities. It is not even a
scientifically founded solution. Traditional Anglo-Saxon intoler-
ance is a local and temporal culture-trait like any other. Even
people as nearly of the same blood and culture as the Spanish
have not had it, and race prejudice in the Spanish-settled coun-
tries is a thoroughly different thing from that in countries domin-
ated by England and the United States. In this country it is
obviously not an intolerance directed against the mixture of
blood of biologically far-separated races, for upon occasion
excitement mounts as high against the Irish Catholic in Boston,
or the Italian in New England mill towns, as against the Oriental
in California. It is the old distinction of the in-group and the
out-group, and if we carry on the primitive tradition in this
matter, we have far less excuse than savage tribes. We have
travelled, we pride ourselves on our sophistication. But we have
failed to understand the relativity of cultural habits, and we
remain debarred from much profit and enjoyment in our human
relations with peoples of different standards, and untrustworthy in
our dealings with them.

The recognition of the cultural basis of race prejudice is a
desperate need in present Western civilization. We have come
to the point where we entertain race prejudice against our blood
brothers the Irish, and where Norway and Sweden speak of
their enmity as if they too represented different blood. The
so-called race line, during a war in which France and Germany
fight on opposite sides, is held to divide the people of Baden
from those of Alsace, though in bodily form they alike belong
to the Alpine sub-race. In a day of footloose movements of
people and of mixed marriages in the ancestry of the most
desirable elements of the community, we preach unabashed the
gospel of the pure race.

To this anthropology makes two answers. The fiirst is as to
the nature of culture and the second is as to the nature of inherit-
ance. The answer as to the nature of culture takes us back
to prehuman societies. There are societies where Nature per-

THE SCIENCE OF CUSTOM Q

petuates the slightest mode of behaviour by biological mechanisms,
but these are societies not of men but of the social insects. The
queen ant, removed to a solitary nest^ will reproduce each trait
of sex behaviour, each detail of the nest. The social insects
represent Nature in a mood when she was taking no chances.
The pattern of the entire social structure she committed to the
ant's instinctive behaviour. There is no greater chance that
the social classes of an ant society, or its patterns of agriculture,
will be lost by an ant's isolation from its group than that the ant
will fail to reproduce the shape of its antennse or the structure
of its abdomen.

For better or for worse, man's solution lies at the opposite
pole. Not one item of his tribal social organization, of his
language, of his local religion, is carried in his germ-cell. In
Europe, in other centuries, when children were occasionally
found who had been abandoned and had maintained themselves
in forests apart from other human beings, they were all so much
alike that Linnaeus classified them as a distinct species, Homo
feruSy and supposed that they were a kind of gnome that man
seldom ran across. He could not conceive that these half-witted
brutes were born human, these creatures with no interest in what
went on about them, rocking themselves rhythmically back and
forth like some wild animal in a zoo, with organs of speech
and hearing that could hardly be trained to do service, who
withstood freezing weather in rags and plucked potatoes out
of boiling water without discomfort. There is no doubt, of
course, that they were children abandoned in infancy, and what
they had all of them lacked was association with their kind,
through which alone man's faculties are sharpened and given
form.

We do not come across wild children in our more humane
civilization. But the point is made as clearly in any case of
adoption of an infant into another race and culture. An Oriental
child adopted by an Occidental family learns English, shows
towards its foster parents the attitudes current among the children
he plays with, and grows up to the same professions that they
elect. He learns the entire set of the cultural traits of the adopted
society, and the set of his real parents' group plays no part.
The same process happens on a grand scale when entire peoples
in a couple of generations shake off their traditional culture and
put on the customs of an alien group. The culture of the
American Negro in northern cities has come to approximate in

lO

PATTERNS OF CULTURE

detail that of the whites in the same cities. A few years ago,
when a cultural survey was made of Harlem, one of the traits
peculiar to the Negroes was their fashion of gambling on the
last three unit figures of the next day’s stock turnover. At least
it cost less than the whites’ corresponding predilection for gam-
bling in the stocks themselves and was no less uncertain and
exciting. It was a vanation on the white pattern, though hardly
a great departure. And most Harlem traits keep still closer to
the forms that are current in white groups.

All over the world, since the beginning of human history.
It can be shown that peoples have been able to adopt the culture
of peoples of another blood. There is nothing in the biological
structure of man that makes it even difficult. Man is not com-
mitted in detail by his biological constitution to any particular
variety of behaviour. The great diversity of social solutions that
man has worked out in different cultures in regard to mating,
for example, or trade, are all equally possible on the basis of
his original endowment. Culture is not a biologically trans-
mitted complex.

What is lost in Nature’s guarantee of safety is made up in
the advantage of greater plasticity. The human affimal does
not, Hke the bear, grow himself a polar coat in order to adapt
himself, after many generations, to the Arctic. He learns to
sew himself a coat and put up a snow house. From all we can
learn of the history of intelHgence in prehuman as well as
human societies, this plasticity has been the soil in which human
progress began and in which it has maintained itself. In the
ages of the mammoths, species after species without plasticity
arose, overreached itself, and died out, undone by the develop-
ment of the very traits it had biologically produced in order
to cope with its environment. The beasts of prey and finally
the higher apes came slowly to rely upon other than biological
adaptations, and upon the consequent increased plasticity the
foundations were laid, bit by bit, for the development of intelli-
gence. Perhaps, as is often suggested, man will destroy himself by
this very development of intelligence. But no one has suggested
any means by which we can return to the biological mechanisms
of the social insect, and we are left no alternative. The human
cultural heritage, for better or for worse, is not biologically
transmitted.

The corollary in modern politics is 'that there is no basis for
the argument that we can trust our spiritual and cultural achieve-

THE SCIENCE OF CUSTOM

II

ments to any selected hereditary germ-plasms. In our Western
civilization, leadership has passed successively in different periods
to the Semitic-speaking peoples, to the Hamitic, to the Medi-
terranean sub-group of the white race, and lately to the Nordic.
There is no doubt about the cultural continuity of the civiliza-
tion, no matter who its carriers were at the moment. We must
accept all the implications of our human inheritance, one of
the most important of which is the small scope of biologically
transmitted behaviour, and the enormous role of the cultural
process of the transmission of tradition.

The second answer anthropology makes to the argument of
the racial purist concerns the nature of heredity. The racial
purist is the victim of a mythology. For what is racial inherit-
ance ” ? We know roughly what heredity is from father to son.
Within a family line the importance of heredity is tremendous.
But heredity is an affair of family lines. Beyond that it is
mythology. In small and static communities like an isolated
Eskimo village, racial ” heredity and the heredity of child and
parent are practically equivalent, and racial heredity therefore
has meaning. But as a concept applied to groups distributed
over a wide area, let us say to Nordics, it has no basis in reality.
In the first place, in all Nordic nations there are family lines
which are represented also in Alpine or Mediterranean com-
munities. Any analysis of the physical make-up of a European
population shows overlapping : the dark-eyed, dark-haired
Swede represents family lines that are more concentrated farther
south, but he is to be understood in relation to what we know
of these latter groups. His heredity, so far as it has any physical
reality, is a matter of his family hne, which is not confined to
Sweden. We do not know how far physical types may vary
without intermixture. We know that inbreeding brings about
a local type. But this is a situation that m our cosmopolitan
white civilization hardly exists, and when racial heredity ’’ is
invoked, as it usually is, to rally a group of persons of about the
same economic status, graduating from much the same schools,
and reading the same weeklies, such a category is merely another
version of the in- and the out-group and does not refer to the
actual biological homogeneity of the group.

What really binds men together is their culture — the ideas
and the standards they have in common. If instead of selecting
a symbol like common blood heredity and making a slogan of
it, the nation turned its attention rather to the culture that

12

PATTERNS OF CULTURE

unites its people, emphasizing its major merits and recognizing
the different values which may develop in a different culture,
it would substitute realistic thinking for a kind of symbolism
which is dangerous because it is misleading.

A knowledge of cultural forms is necessary in social thinking,
and the present volume is concerned with this problem of culture.
As we have just seen, bodily form, or race, is separable from
culture, and can for our purposes be laid to one side except at
certain points where for some special reason it becomes relevant.
The chief requirement for a discussion of culture is that it should
be based on a wide selection of possible cultural forms. It is
only by means of such facts that we can possibly differentiate
between those human adjustments that are culturally conditioned
and those that are common and, so far as we can see, inevitable
in mankind. We cannot discover by introspection or by observa-
tion of any one society what behaviour is “instinctive ”, that
is, organically determined. In order to class any behaviour
as instinctive, much more is necessary than that it should be
proved to be automatic. The conditioned response is as auto-
matic as the organically determined, and culturally conditioned
responses make up the greater part of our huge equipment of
automatic behaviour.

Therefore the most illuminating material for a discussion of
cultural forms and processes is that of societies historically as little
related as possible to our own and to one another. With the
vast network of historical contact which has spread the great
civilizations over tremendous areas, primitive cultures are now
the one source to which we can turn. They are a laboratory
m which we may study the diversity of human institutions. With
their comparative isolation, many prinndtive regions have had
centuries in which to elaborate the cultural themes they have
made their own. They provide ready to our hand the necessary
information concerning the possible great variations in human
adjustments, and a critical examination of them is essential for
any understanding of cultural processes. It is the only laboratory
of social forms that we have or shall have.

This laboratory has another advantage. The problems are
set in simpler terms than in the great Western civilizations. With
the inventions that make for ease of transportation, international
cables and telephones and radio transmission, those that ensure
permanence and widespread distribution to the printed page,
the development of competing professional groups and cults and

THE SCIENCE OF CUSTOM 1 3

classes and their standardization over the world, modern civiliza-
tion has grown too complex for adequate analysis except as it is
broken up for the purpose into small artificial sections. And
these partial analyses are inadequate because so many outside
factors cannot be controlled. A survey of any one group involves
individuals out of opposed heterogeneous groups, with different
standards, social aims, home relations, and morality. The inter-
relation of these groups is too complicated to evaluate in the
necessary detail. In primitive society, the cultural tradition is
simple enough to be contained within the knowledge of individual
adults, and the manners and morals of the group are moulded
to one well-defined general pattern. It is possible to estimate
the inter-relation of traits in this simple environment in a way
which is impossible in the cross-currents of our complex civilization.

Neither of these reasons for stressing the facts of primitive
culture has anything to do with the use that has been classically
made of this material. This use had to do with a reconstruction
of origins. Early anthropologists tried to arrange all traits of
different cultures in an evolutionary sequence from the earliest
forms to their final development in Western civilization. But
there is no reason to suppose that by discussing Australian
religion rather than our own we are uncovering primordial
religion, or that by discussing Iroquoian social organization we
are returning to the mating habits of man’s early ancestors.

Since we are forced to believe that the race of man is one
species, it follows that man everywhere has an equally long
history behind him. Some primitive tribes may have held rela-
tively closer to primordial forms of behaviour than civilized man,
but this can only be relative and our guesses are as likely to be
wrong as right. There is no justification for identifying some
one contemporary primitive custom with the original type of
human behaviour. Methodologically there is only one means
by which we may gain an approximate knowledge of these early
beginnings. That is by a study of the distribution of those
few traits that are universal or near-universal in human society.
There are several that are well known. Of these everyone
agrees upon animism, and the exogamous restrictions upon
marriage. The conceptions, diverse as they prove to be, of the
human soul, and of an after-life, raise more question. Beliefs
as nearly universal as these we may justifiably regard as exceed-
ingly old human inventions. This is not equivalent to regarding
them as biologically determined, for they may have been very

PATTERNS OF CULTURE

14

early inventions of the human race, “ cradle traits which have
become fundamental in all human thinking. In the last analysis
they may be as socially conditioned as any local custom. But
they have long since become automatic in human behaviour.
They are old, and they are universal. All this, however, does
not make the forms that can be observed to-day the original
forms that arose in primordial times. Nor is there any way of
reconstructing these origins from the study of their varieties.
One may isolate the universal core of the belief and differentiate
from this its local forms, but it is still possible that the trait
took its rise in a pronounced local form and not in some original
least common denominator of all observed traits.

For this reason the use of primitive customs to establish
origins is speculative. It is possible to build up an argument
for any origin that can be desired, origins that are mutually
exclusive as well as those that are complementary. Of all the
uses of anthropological material, this is the one in which specula-
tion has followed speculation most rapidly, and where in the
nature of the case no proof can be given.

Nor does the reason for using primitive societies for the
discussion of social forms have necessary connection with a
romantic return to the primitive. It is put forward in no spirit
of poeticizing the simpler peoples. There are many ways in
which the culture of one or another people appeals to us strongly
in this era of heterogeneous standards and confused mechanical
bustle. But it is not in a return to ideals preserved for us by
primitive peoples that our society will heal itself of its maladies.
The romantic Utopianism that reaches out towards the simpler
primitive, attractive as it sometimes may be, is as often, in
ethnological study, a hindrance as a help.

The careful study of primitive societies is important to-day
rather, as we have said, because they provide case material for
the study of cultural forms and processes. They help us to
differentiate between those responses that are specific to local
cultural types and those that are general to mankind. Beyond
this, they help us to gauge and understand the immensely
important role of culturally conditioned behaviour. Culture,
with its processes and functions, is a subject upon which we
need all the enlightenment we can achieve, and there is no
direction in which we can seek with greater reward than in the
facts of preliterate societies.

Chapter II

THE DIVERSITY OF CULTURES

I

A chief of the Digger Indians, as the Californians call them,
talked to me a great deal about the ways of his people in the
old days. He was a Christian and a leader among his people
in the planting of peaches and apncots on irrigated land, but
when he talked of the shamans who had transformed themselves
into bears before his eyes in the bear dance, his hands trembled
and his voice broke with excitement. It was an incomparable
thing, the power his people had had in the old days. He liked
best to talk of the desert foods they had eaten. He brought
each uprooted plant lovingly and with an unfailing sense of its
importance. In those days his people had eaten “ the health
of the desert ”, he said, and knew nothing of the insides of tin
cans and the things for sale at butcher shops. It was such
innovations that had degraded them in these latter days.

One day, without transition, Ramon broke in upon his
descriptions of grinding mesquite and preparing acorn soup.
“ In the beginning ”, he said, “ God gave to every people a
cup, a cup of clay, and from this cup they drank their life.” I
do not know whether the figure occurred in some traditional
ritual of his people that I never found, or whether it was his own
imagery. It is hard to imagine that he had heard it from the
whites he had known at Banning ; they were not given to discussing
the ethos of different peoples. At any rate, in the mind of this
humble Indian the figure of speech was clear and full of meaning.
“ They all dipped in the water,” he continued, “ but their cups
were different. Our cup is broken now. It has passed away.”

Our cup is broken. Those things that have given significance
to the life of his people, the domestic rituals of eating, the obliga-
tions of the economic system, the succession of ceremonials in
the villages, possession in the bear dance, their standards of
right and wrong — these were gone, and with them the shape
and meaning of their life. The old man was still vigorous and
a leader in relationships with the whites. He did not mean
that there was any question of the extinction of his people. But
he had in mind the loss of something that had value equal to

15

1 6 PATTERNS OF CULTURE

that of life itself, the whole fabric of his people’s standards and
beliefs. There were other cups of living left, and they held
perhaps the same water, but the loss was irreparable. It was
no matter of tinkering with an addition here, lopping off some-
thing there. The modelling had been fundamental, it was some-
how all of a piece. It had been their own.

Ramon had had personal experience of the matter of which
he spoke. He straddled two cultures whose values and ways of
thought were incommensurable. It is a hard fate. In Western
civilization our expenences have been different. We are bred
to one cosmopolitan culture, and our social sciences, our psycho-
logy, and our theology persistently ignore the truth expressed in
Ramon’s figure.

The course of life and the pressure of environment, not to
speak of the fertility of human imagination, provide an incredible
number of possible leads, all of which, it appears, may serve a
society to live by. There are the schemes of ownership, with
the social hierarchy that may be associated with possessions ;
there are material things and their elaborate technology ; there
are all the facets of sex life, parenthood and post-parenthood ;
there are the guilds or cults which may give structure to the
society ; there is economic exchange ; there are the gods and
supernatural sanctions. Each one of these and many more may
be followed out with a cultural and ceremonial elaboration
which monopolizes the cultural energy and leaves small surplus
for the building of other traits. Aspects of life that seem to us
most important have been passed over with small regard by
peoples whose culture, oriented in another direction, has been
far from poor. Or the same trait may be so greatly elaborated
that we reckon it as fantastic.

It is in cultural life as it is in speech j selection is the prime
necessity. The numbers of sounds that can be produced by
our vocal cords and our oral and nasal cavities are practically
unlimited. The three or four dozen of the English language
are a selection which coincides not even with those of such
closely related dialects as German and French. The total that
arc used in different languages of the world no one has even
dared to estimate. But each language must make its selection
and abide by it on pain of not being intelligible at all. A
language that used even a few hundreds of the possible — and
actually recorded— phonetic elements could not be used for
communication. On the other hand a great deal of our mis-

THE DIVERSITY OF CULTURES 1 7

understanding of languages unrelated to our own has arisen from
our attempts to refer alien phonetic systems back to ours as a
point of reference. We recognize only one L If other people
have five k sounds placed in different positions in the throat
and mouth, distinctions of vocabulary and of syntax that depend
on these differences are impossible to us until we master them.
We have a d and an n. They may have an intermediate sound
which, if we fail to identify it, we write now d and now n, intro-
ducing distinctions which do not exist. The elementary pre-
requisite of linguistic analysis is a consciousness of these incredibly
numerous available sounds from which each language makes its
own selections.

In culture too we must imagine a great arc on which are
ranged the possible interests provided either by the human age-
cycle or by the environment or by man’s various activities, A
culture that capitalized even a considerable proportion of these
would be as unintelligible as a language that used all the clicks,
all the glottal stops, all the labials, dentals, sibilants, and gutturals
from voiceless to voiced and from oral to nasal. Its identity
as a culture depends upon the selection of some segments of this
arc. Every human society everywhere has made such selection
in its cultural institutions. Each from the point of view of
another ignores fundamentals and exploits irrelevancies. One
culture hardly recognizes monetary values ; another has made
them fundamental in every field of behaviour. In one society
technology is unbelievably slighted even in those aspects of life
which se-em necessary to ensure survival ; in another, equally
simple, technological achievements are complex and fitted with
admirable nicety to the situation. One builds an enormous
cultural superstructure upon adolescence, one upon death, one
upon after-life.

The case of adolescence is particularly interesting, because
it is in the limelight in our own civilization and because we
have plentiful information from other cultures. In our own
civilization a whole library of psychological studies has emphasized
the inevitable unrest of the period of puberty. It is in our
tradition a physiological state as definitely characterized by
domestic explosions and rebellion as typhoid is marked by fever.
There is no question of the facts. They are common in America.
The question is rather of their inevitability.

The most casual survey of the ways in which different societies
have handled adolescence makes one fact inescapable : even in

1 8 PATTERNS OF CULTURE

those cultures which have made most of the trait, the age upon
which they focus their attention varies over a great range of
years. At the outset, therefore, it is clear that the so-called
puberty institutions are a misnomer if we continue to think of
biological puberty. The puberty they recognize is social, and
the ceremonies are a recognition in some fashion or other of the
child’s new status of adulthood. This investiture with new
occupations and obligations is in consequence as various and
as culturally conditioned as the occupations and obligations
themselves. If the sole honourable duty of manhood is conceived
to be deeds of war, the investiture of the warrior is later and of a
different sort from that in a society where adulthood gives chiefly
the privilege of dancing in a representation of masked gods. In
order to understand puberty institutions, we do not most need
analyses of the necessary nature of rites de passage ; we need
rather to know what is identified in different cultures with the
beginning of adulthood and their methods of admitting to the
new status. Not biological puberty, but what adulthood means
in that culture conditions the puberty ceremony.

Adulthood in central North America means warfare. Honour
in it is the great goal of all men. The constantly recurring
theme of the youth’s coming-of-age, as also of preparation for
the war-path at any age, is a magic ritual for success in war. They
torture not one another, but themselves ; they cut strips of skin
from their arms and legs, they strike off their fingers, they drag
heavy weights pinned to their chest or leg muscles. Their
reward is enhanced prowess in deeds of warfare.

In Australia, on the other hand, adulthood means participa-
tion in an exclusively male cult whose fundamental trait is the
exclusion of women. Any woman is put to death if she so
much as hears the sound of the bull-roarer at the ceremonies,
and she must never know of the rites. Puberty ceremonies are
elaborate and symbolic repudiations of the bonds with the female
sex ; the men are symbolically made self-sufficient and the
wholly responsible element of the community. To attain this
end they use drastic sexual rites and bestow supernatural
guarantees.

The clear physiological facts of adolescence, therefore, are
first socially interpreted even where they are stressed. But a
survey of puberty institutions makes clear a further fact : puberty
is physiologically a different matter in the life-cycle of the male
and the female. If cultural emphasis followed the physiological

THE DIVERSITY OF CULTURES 1 9

emphasis, girls’ ceremonies would be more marked than boys’ ;
but it IS not so. The ceremonies emphasize a social fact : the
adult prerogatives of men are more far-reaching in every culture
than women’s, and consequently, as m the above instances, it
IS more common for societies to take note of this period in boys
than in girls.

Girls’ and boys’ puberty, however, may be socially celebrated
in the same tribe in identical ways. Where, as in the interior
of British Columbia, adolescent rites are a magical training for
all occupations, girls are included on the same terms as boys.
Boys roll stones down mountains and beat them to the bottom
to be swift of foot, or throw gambling-sticks to be lucky in gam-
bling ; girls carry water from distant springs, or drop stones
down inside their dresses that their children may be born as
easily as the pebble drops to the ground.

In such a tribe as the Nandi of the lake region of East Africa,
also, girls and boys share an even-handed puberty rite, though,
because of the man’s dominant role in the culture, his boyhood
training period is more stressed than the woman’s. Here adoles-
cent rites are an ordeal inflicted by those already admitted to
adult status upon those they are now forced to admit. They
require of them the most complete stoicism in the face of in-
genious tortures associated with circumcision. The rites for the
two sexes are separate, but they follow the same pattern. In
both the novices wear for the ceremony the clothing of their
sweethearts. During the operation their faces are watched for
any twinge of pain, and the reward of bravery is given with
great rejoicing by the lover, who runs forward to receive back
some of his adornments. For both the girl and the boy the
rites mark their entree into a new sex status : the boy is now a
warrior and may take a sweetheart, the girl is marriageable.
The adolescent tests are for both a pre-marital ordeal in which
the palm is awarded by their lovers.

Puberty rites may also be built upon the facts of girls’ puberty
and admit of no extension to boys. One of the most naive of
these is the institution of the fatting-house for girls in central
Africa. In the region where feminine beauty is all but identified
with obesity, the girl at puberty is segregated, sometimes for
years, fed with sweet and fatty foods, allowed no activity, and
her body rubbed assiduously with oils. She is taught during
this time her future duties, and her seclusion ends with a parade
of her corpulence that is followed by her marriage to her proud

20

PATTERNS OF CULTURE

bridegroom. It is not regarded as necessary for the man to
achieve pulchritude before marnage in a similar fashion.

The usual ideas around which girls’ puberty institutions are
centred, and which are not readily extended to boys’, are those
concerned with menstruation. The uncleanness of the men-
struating woman is a veiy widespread idea, and in a few regions
first menstruation has been made the focus of all the associated
attitudes. Puberty rites in these cases are of a thoroughly dif-
ferent character from any of which we have spoken. Among
the Carrier Indians of British Columbia, the fear and horror of
a girl’s puberty was at its height. Her three or four years of
seclusion was called " the burying alive ”, and she lived for all
that time alone in the wilderness, in a hut of branches far from
all beaten trails. She was a threat to any person who might
so much as catch a glimpse of her, and her mere footstep defiled
a path or a river. She was covered with a great head-dress of
tanned skin that shrouded her face and breasts and fell to the
ground behind. Her arms and legs were loaded with sinew
bands to protect her from the evil spirit with which she was
filled. She was herself in danger and she was a source of danger
to everybody else.

Girls’ puberty ceremonies built upon ideas associated with
the menses are readily convertible into what is, from the point
of view of the individual concerned, exactly opposite behaviour.
There arc always two possible aspects to the sacred : it may be
a source of peril or it may be a source of blessing. In some
tribes the first menses of girls are a potent supernatural blessing.
Among the Apaches I have seen the priests themselves pass on
their knees before the row of solemn little girls to receive from
them the blessing of their touch. All the babies and the old
people come also of necessity to have illness removed from them.
The adolescent girls are not segregated as sources of danger, but
court is paid to them as to direct sources of supernatural blessing.
Since the ideas that underlie puberty rites for girls, both among
the Carrier and among the Apache, are founded on beliefs con-
cerning menstruation, they are not extended to boys, and boys’
puberty is marked instead, and lightly, with simple tests and
proofs of manhood.

The adolescent behaviour, therefore, even of girls was not
dictated by some physiological characteristic of the period itself,
but rather by marital or magic requirements socially connected
with it. These beliefs made adolescence in one tribe serenely

THE DIVERSITY OF CULTURES

21

religious and beneficent, and m another so dangerously unclean
that the child had to cry out in warning that others might
avoid her in the woods. The adolescence of girls may equally,
as we have seen, be a theme which a culture does not institu-
tionalize. Even where, as m most of Australia, boys’ adolescence
is given elaborate treatment, it may be that the rites are an
induction into the status of manhood and male participation in
tribal matters, and female adolescence passes without any kind
of formal recognition.

These facts, however, still leave the fundamental question
unanswered. Do not all cultures have to cope with the natural
turbulence of this period, even though it may not be given
institutional expression ? Dr. Mead has studied this question in
Samoa, There the girl’s life passes through well-marked periods.
Her first years out of babyhood are passed in small neighbour-
hood gangs of age mates from which the little boys are strictly
excluded. The corner of the village to which she belongs is
all-important, and the little boys are traditional enemies. She
has one duty, that of baby-tending, but she takes the baby with her
rather than stays at home to mind it, and her play is not seriously
hampered. A couple of years before puberty, when she grows
strong enough to have more difficult tasks required of her and
old enough to learn more skilled techniques, the little girls’ play
group in which she grew up ceases to exist. She assumes woman’s
dress and must contribute to the work of the household. It
is an uninteresting period of life to her and quite without turmoil.
Puberty brings no change at all.

A few years after she has come of age, she will begin the
pleasant years of casual and irresponsible love affairs that she
will prolong as far as possible into the period when marriage is
already considered fitting. Puberty itself is marked by no social
recognition, no change of attitude or of expectancy. Her pre-
adolescent shyness is supposed to remain unchanged for a couple
of years. The girl’s life in Samoa is blocked out by other con-
siderations than those of physiological sex maturity, and puberty
falls in a particularly unstressed and peaceful period during which
no adolescent conflicts manifest themselves. Adolescence, there-
fore, may not only be culturally passed over without ceremonial ;
it may also be without importance in the emotional life of the
child and in the attitude of the village towards her.

Warfare is another social theme that may or may not be
used in any culture. Where war is made much of, it may be

22

PATTERNS OF CULTURE

with contrasting objectives, with contrasting organization in
relation to the state, and with contrasting sanctions. War may
be, as it was among the Aztecs, a way of getting captives for
the religious sacnfices. Since the Spaniards fought to kill,
according to Aztec standards they broke the rules of the game.
The Aztecs fell back in dismay and Cortez walked as victor
into the capital.

There are even quainter notions, from our standpoint, associ-
ated with warfare in different parts of the world. For our
purposes it is sufficient to notice those regions where organized
resort to mutual slaughter never occurs between social groups.
Only our familiarity with war makes it intelligible that a state
of warfare should alternate with a state of peace in one tribe’s
dealings with another. The idea is quite common over the
world, of course. But on the one hand it is impossible for
certain peoples to conceive the possibility of a state of peace,
which m their notion would be equivalent to admitting enemy
tribes to the category of human beings, which by definition
they are not even though the excluded tribe may be of their
own race and culture.

On the other hand, it may be just as impossible for a people
to conceive of the possibility of a state of war. Rasmussen tells
of the blankness with which the Eskimo met his exposition of
our custom. Eskimos very well understand the act of kilhng a
man. If he is in your way, you cast up your estimate of your
own strength, and if you are ready to take it upon yourself, you
kill him. If you are strong, there is no social retribution. But
the idea of an Eskimo village going out against another Eskimo
village in battle array or a tribe against a tnbe, or even of another
village being fair game in ambush warfare, is alien to them. All
killing comes under one head, and is not separated, as ours
is, into categories, the one meritorious, the other a capital
offence.

I myself tried to talk of warfare to the Missibn Indians of
California, but it was impossible. Their misunderstanding of
warfare was abysmal. They did not have the basis in their
own culture upon which the idea could exist, and their attempts
to resison it out reduced the great wars to which we are able
to dedicate ourselves with moral fervour to the level of alley
brawls. They did not happen to have a cultural pattern that
distinguished between them.

War is, we have been forced to admit even in the face of its

THE DIVERSITY OF CULTURES 23

huge place in our own civilization, an asocial trait. In the chaos
following the First World War all the war-time arguments that
expounded its fostering of courage, of altruism, of spiritual values,
give out a false and offensive ring. War in our own civilization
is as good an illustration as one can take of the destructive
lengths to which the development of a culturally selected trait
may go. If we justify war, it is because all peoples always
justify the traits of which they find themselves possessed, not
because war will bear an objective examination of its merits.

Warfare is not an isolated case. From every part of the
world and from all levels of cultural complexity it is possible
to illustrate the overweening and finally often the asocial elabora-
tion of a cultural trait. Those cases are clearest where, as in
dietary or mating regulations, for example, traditional usage runs
counter to biological drives. Social organization, in anthropo-
logy, has a quite specialized meaning owing to the unanimity
of all human societies in stressing relationship groups within
which marriage is forbidden. No known people regard all
women as possible mates. This is not in an effort, as is so often
supposed, to prevent inbreeding in our sense, for over great parts
of the world it is an own cousin, often the daughter of one’s
mother’s brother, who is the predestined spouse. The relatives
to whom the prohibition refers differ utterly among different
peoples, but all human societies are alike in placing a restriction.
No human idea has received more constant and complex elabora-
tion in culture than this of incest. The incest groups are often
the most important functioning units of the tribe, and the duties
of every individual in relation to any other are defined by their
relative positions in these groups. These groups function as
units in religious ceremonials and in cycles of economic exchange,
and it is impossible to exaggerate the importance of the role
they have played in social history.

Some areas handle the incest tabu with moderation. In
spite of the restrictions there may be a considerable number of
women available for a man to marry. In others the group
that is tabu has been extended by a social fiction to include
vast numbers of individuals who have no traceable ancestors
in common, and choice of a mate is in consequence excessively
limited. This social fiction receives unequivocal expression in
the terms of relationship which are used. Instead of distin-
guishing lineal from collateral kin as we do in the distinction
between father and uncle, brother and cousin, one term means

PATTERNS OF CULTURE

24

literally “ man of my father’s group (relationship, locality, etc.)
of his generation ”, not distinguishing between direct and col-
lateral lines, but making other distinctions that are foreign to us.
Certain tribes of eastern Australia use an extreme form of this
so-called classificatory kinship system. Those whom they call
brothers and sisters are all those of their generation with whom
they recognize any relationship. There is no cousin category
or anything that corresponds to it ; all relatives of one’s own
generation are one’s brothers and sisters.

This manner of reckoning relationship is not uncommon in
the world, but Australia has in addition an uriparalleled horror
of sister marriage and an unparalleled developmient of exogamous
restrictions. So the Kurnai, with their extreme classificatory
relationship system, feel the Australian horror of sex relationship
with all their “ sisters ”, that is, women of their own generation
who are in any way related to them. Besides this, the Kurnai
have strict locality rules in the choice of a mate. Sometimes
two localities, out of the fifteen or sixteen of which the tribe is
composed, must exchange women, and can have no mates in
any other group. Sometimes there is a group of two or three
localities that may exchange with two or three others. Still
further, as in all Australia, the old men are a privileged group,
and their prerogatives extend to marrying the young and attrac-
tive girls. The consequence of these rules is, of course, that in
all the local group which must by absolute prescription furnish a
young man with his wife, there is no girl who is not touched by
one of these tabus. Either she is one of those who through
relationship with his mother is his “ sister ”, or she is already
bargained for by an old man, or for some lesser reason she is
forbidden to him.

That does not bring the Kurnai to reformulate their exogam-
ous rules. They insist upon them with every show of violence.
Therefore, the only way they are usually able to marry is by
flying violently in the face of the regulations. They elope.
As soon as the village knows that an elopement has occurred,
it sets out in pursuit, and if the couple are caught the two are
killed. It does not matter that possibly all of the pursuers
were married by elopement in the same fashion. Moral indig-
nation runs high. There is, however, an island traditionally
recognized as a safe haven, and if the couple can reach it and
remain away till the birth of a child, they are received again
with blows, it is true, but they may defend themselves. After

THE DIVERSITY OF CULTURES

25

they have run the gauntlet and been given their drubbing, they
take up the status of married people in the tribe.

The Kurnai meet their cultural dilemma typically enough.
They have extended and complicated a particular aspect of
behaviour until it is a social liability. They must either modify
it, or get by with a subterfuge. And they use the subterfuge.
They avoid extinction, and they maintain their ethics without
acknowledged revision. This manner of dealing with the mores
has lost nothing in the progress of civilization. The older genera-
tion of our own civilization similarly maintained monogamy and
supported prostitution, and the panegyncs of monogamy were
never so fervent as in the great days of the red-light districts.
Societies have always justified favourite traditional forms. When
these traits get out of hand and some form of supplementary
behaviour is called in, lip service is given as readily to the tradi-
tional form as if the supplementary behaviour did not exist.

Such a bird’s-eye survey of human cultural forms makes
clear several common misconceptions. In the first place, the
institutions that human cultures build up upon the hints pre-
sented by the environment or by man’s physical necessities do
not keep as close to the original impulse as we easily imagine.
These hints are, in reality, mere rough sketches, a list of bare
facts. They are pin-point potentialities, and the elaboration that
takes place around them is dictated by many aKen considerations.
Warfare is not the expression of the instinct of pugnacity. Man’s
pugnacity is so small a hint in the human equipment that it
may not be given any expression in inter-tribal relations. When
it is institutionalized, the form it takes follows other grooves
of thought than those implied in the original impulse. Pugnacity
is no more than the touch to the ball of custom, a touch also that
may be withheld.

Such a view of cultural processes calls for a recasting of
many of our current arguments upholding our traditional institu-
tions. These arguments are usually based on the impossibility
of man’s functioning without these particular traditional forms.
Even very special traits come in for this kind of validation, such
as the particular form of economic drive that arises under our
particular system of property ownership. This is a remarkably
special motivation and there are evidences that even in our
generation it is being strongly modified. At any rate, we do
not have to confuse the issue by discussing it as if it were a matter
of biological survival values. Self-support is a motive our

PATTERNS OF CULTURE

26

civilization has capitalized. If our economic structure changes
so that this motive is no longer so potent a drive as it was in the
era of the great frontier and expanding industrialism, there are
many other motives that would be appropnate to a changed
economic organization. Every culture, every era, exploits some
few out of a great number of possibilities. Changes may be
very disquieting, and involve great losses, but this is due to
the difficulty of change itself, not to the fact that our age and
country has hit upon the one possible motivation under which
human life can be conducted. Change, we must remember,
with all its difficulties, is inescapable. Our fears over even
very minor shifts in custom are usually quite beside the point.
Civilizations might change far more radically than any human
authority has ever had the will or the imagination to change
them, and still be completely workable. The minor changes
that occasion so much denunciation to-day, such as the increase
of divorce, the growing secularization in our cities, the prevalence
of the petting party, and many more, could be taken up quite
readily into a slightly different pattern of culture. Becoming
traditional, they would be given the same richness of content,
the same importance and value, that the older patterns had
in other generations.

The truth of the matter is rather that the possible human
institutions and motives are legion, on every plane of cultural
simplicity or complexity, and that wisdom consists in a greatly
increased tolerance towards their divergencies. No man can
thoroughly participate in any culture unless he has been brought
up and has lived according to its forms, but he can grant to
other cultures the same significance to their participants which
he recognizes in his own.

n

The diversity of culture results not only from the ease with
which societies elaborate or reject possible aspects of existence.
It is due even more to a complex interweaving of cultural traits.
The final form of any traditional institution, as we have just
said, goes far beyond the original human impulse. In great
measure this final form depends upon the way in which the trait
has merged with other traits from different fields of experience.

A widespread trait may be saturated with religious beliefs
among one people and function as an important aspect of their
religion. In another area it may be wholly a matter of economic

THE DIVERSITY OF CULTURES

27

transfer and be therefore an aspect of their monetary arrange-
ments. The possibilities are endless and the adjustments are
often bizarre. The nature of the trait will be quite different
in the different areas according to the elements with which it
has combined.

It is important to make this process clear to ourselves because
otherwise we fall easily into the temptation to generalize into a
sociological law the results of a local merging of traits, or we
assume their union to be a universal phenomenon. The great
period of European plastic art was religiously motivated. Art
pictured and made common property the religious scenes and
dogmas which were fundamental in the outlook of that period.
Modern European aesthetics would have been quite different if
mediaeval art had been purely decorative and had not made
common cause with religion.

As a matter of history great developments m art have often
been remarkably separate from religious motivation and use.
Art may be kept definitely apart from religion even where both
are highly developed. In the pueblos of the South-West of the
United States, art-forms in pottery and textiles command the
respect of the artist in any culture, but their sacred bowls carried
by the priests or set out on the altars are shoddy and the decora-
tions crude and unstylized. Museums have been known to throw
out South-West religious objects because they were so far below
the traditional standard of workmanship. We have to put a
frog there,” the Zuhi Indians say, meaning that the religious
exigencies eliminate any need of artistry. This separation be-
tween art and religion is not a unique trait of the Pueblos.
Tribes of South America and of Siberia make the same distinc-
tion, though they motivate it in various ways. They do not
use their artistic skill in the service of religion. Instead, there-
fore, of finding the sources of art in a locally important subject
matter, religion, as older critics of art have sometimes done, we
need rather to explore the extent *to which these two can mutually
interpenetrate, and the consequences of such merging for both
art and religion.

The interpenetration of different fields of experience, and
the consequent modification of both of them, can be shown from
all phases of existence : economics, sex relations, folklore,
material culture, and religion. The process can be illustrated
in one of the widespread religious traits of the North American
Indians. Up and down the continent, in every culture area

PATTERNS OF CULTURE

28

except that of the Pueblos of the South-West, supernatural power
was obtained in a dream or vision. Success in life, according
to their beliefs, was due to personal contact with the super-
natural. Each man’s vision gave him power for his lifetime,
and in some tribes he was constantly renewing his personal
relationship with the spirits by seeking further visions. What-
ever he saw, an animal or a star, a plant or a supernatural being,
adopted him as a personal proteg^, and he could call upon
him in need. He had duties to perform for his visionary patron,
gifts to give him and obligations of all kinds. In return the spirit
gave him the specific powers he promised him in his vision.

In every great region of North Amenca this guardian spirit
complex took different form according to the other traits of the
culture with which it was most closely associated. In the
plateaus of British Columbia it merged with the adolescent
ceremonies we have just spoken of. Both boys and girls, among
these tribes, went out into the mountains at adolescence for a
magic training. Puberty ceremonies have a wide distribution
up and down the Pacific Coast, and over most of this region
they are quite distinct from the guardian spirit practices. But
in British Columbia they were merged. The climax of the
magic adolescent training for boys was the acquisition of a
guardian spirit who by its gifts dictated the life-time profession
of the young man. He became a warrior, a shaman, a hunter,
or a gambler according to the supernatural visitant. Girls also
received guardian spirits representing their domestic duties. So
strongly is the guardian spirit experience among these peoples
moulded by its association with the ceremonial of adolescence
that anthropologists who know this region have argued that
the entire vision complex of the American Indians had its origin
in puberty rites. But the two are not genetically connected.
They are locally merged, and in the merging both traits have
taken special and characteristic forms.

In other parts of the continent, the guardian spirit is not
sought at puberty, nor by all the youths of the tribe. Conse-
quently the complex has in these cultures no kind of relationship
with puberty rites even when any such exist. On the southern
plains it is adult men who must acquire mystic sanctions. The
vision complex merged with a trait very different from puberty
rites. The Osage are organized in kinship groups in which
descent is traced through the father and disregards the mother’s
line. These clan groups have a common inheritance of super-

THE DIVERSITY OF CULTURES

29

natural blessing. The legend of each clan tells how its ancestor
sought a vision, and was blessed by the animal whose name
the clan has inherited The ancestor of the mussel clan sought
seven times, with the tears running down his face, a super-
natural blessing. At last he met the mussel and spoke to it,
saying :

O grandfather.

The little ones have nothing of which to make their bodies.

Thereupon the mussel answered him :

You say the little ones have nothing of which to make their bodies
Let the little ones make of me their bodies
When the little ones make of me their bodies.

They shall always live to see old age
Behold the wrinkles upon my skin [shell]

Which I have made to be the means of reaching old age.

When the little ones make of me their bodies

They shall always live to see the signs of old age upon their skins

The seven bends of the river [of life]

I pass successfully

And m my travels the gods themselves have not the power to see the trail
that I make

When the little ones make of me their bodies

No one, not even the gods, shall be able to see the trail they make
Among these people all the familiar elements of the vision
quest are present, but it was attained by a first ancestor of the
clan, and its blessings are inherited by a blood-relationship group.

This situation among the Osage presents one of the fullest
pictures in the world of totemism, that close mingling of social
organization and of religious veneration for the ancestor. Totem-
ism is described from all parts of the world, and anthropologists
have argued that the clan totem originated m the ‘‘ personal
totem ”, or guardian spirit. But the situation is exactly analogous
to that of the plateaus of British Columbia where the vision
quest merged with the adolescent rites, only that here it has
merged with hereditary privileges of the clan. So strong has
this new association become that a vision is no longer thought
to give a man power automatically. The blessings of the vision
are attained only by inheritance, and among the Osage long
chants have grown up describing the ancestor’s encounters,
and detailing the blessings which his descendants may claim in
consequence.

In both these cases it is not only the vision complex which
receives a different character in different regions as it merges
with puberty rites or clan organization. The adolescence cere-
monies and the social organization are equally coloured by the

30 PATTERNS OF CULTURE

interweaving of the vision quest. The interaction is mutual.
The vision complex, the puberty rites, the clan organization, and
many other traits that enter also into close relationship with
the vision, are strands which are braided in many combinations.
The consequences of the different combinations that result from
this intermingling of traits cannot be exaggerated. In both the
regions of which we have just spoken, both where the religious
experience was merged with puberty rites and where it was merged
with clan organization, as a natural corollary of the associated
practices all individuals of the tribe could receive power from
the vision for success in any undertaking. Achievement m any
occupation was credited to the individual’s claim upon a vision
experience. A successful gambler or a successful hunter drew
his power from it just as a successful shaman did. According to
their dogma all avenues of advancement were closed to those
who had failed to obtain a supernatural patron.

In California, however, the vision was the professional war-
rant of the shaman. It marked him as a person apart. It was
just in this region, therefore, that the most aberrant aspects of
this experience were developed. The vision was no longer a
slight hallucination for which the stage could be set by fasting
and torture and isolation. It was a trance experience which
overtook the exceptionally unstable members of the community
and especially the women. Among the Shasta it was the con-
vention that only women were so blessed. The required experi-
ence was definitely cataleptic and came upon the novice after
a preliminary dreaming had prepared the way. She fell senseless
and rigid to the ground. When she came to herself, blood
oozed from her mouth. All the ceremonies by which for years
after she validated her call to be a shaman were further demons-
trations of her liability to cataleptic seizures and were regarded
as the cure by which her life was saved. In tribes like the
Shasta not only the vision experience had changed its character
to a violent seizure which differentiated religious practitioners
from all others, but the character of the shamans was equally
modified by the nature of the trance experience. They were
definitely the unstable members of the community. In this
region contests between shamans took the form of dancing each
other down, that is, of seeing which one could withstand longest
in a dance the cataleptic seizure which would inevitably over-
take them. Both the vision experience and shamanism had been
profoundly affected by the close relationship into which they

THE DIVERSITY OF CULTURES 3 1

had entered. The merging of the two traits, no less than the
merging of the vision experience and puberty rites or clan
organization, had drastically modified both fields of behaviour.

In the same way m our own civilization the separateness
of the church and of the marriage sanction is historically clear,
yet the religious sacrament of wedlock for centuries dictated
developments both in sex behaviour and in the church. The
peculiar character of marriage during those centuries was due
to the merging of two essentially unrelated cultural traits. On
the other hand, marriage has often been the means by which
wealth was traditionally transferred. In cultures where this is
true, the close association of marriage with economic transfer
may quite obliterate the fact that mamage is fundamentally a
matter of sexual and child-rearing adjustments. Marriage in
each case must be understood in relation to other traits to which
it has become assimilated, and we should not run into the mis-
take of thinking that “ marriage ” can be understood in the two
cases by the same set of ideas. We must allow for the differ-
ent components which have been built up into the resulting trait.

We greatly need the ability to analyse traits of our own
cultural heritage into their several parts. Our discussions of
the social order would gain in clarity if we learned to under-
stand m this way the complexity of even our simplest behaviour.
Racial differences and prestige prerogatives have so merged
among Anglo-Saxon peoples that we fail to separate biological
racial matters from our most socially conditioned prejudices.
Even among nations as nearly related to the Anglo-Saxons as
the Latin peoples, such prejudices take different forms, so that
in Spanish-colonized countries and in British colonies racial dif-
ferences have not the same social significance. Christianity and
the position of women, similarly, are historically inter-related
traits, and they have at different times interacted very dif-
ferently. The present high position of women in Christian
countries is no more a “ result ’’ of Christianity than was Origen’s
coupling of woman with the deadly temptations. These inter-
penetrations of traits occur and disappear, and the history of
culture is in considerable degree a history of their nature and
fates and associations. But the genetic connection we so easily see
in a complex trait and our horror at any disturbance of its inter-
relationships is largely illusory. The diversity of the possible
combinations is endless, and adequate social orders can be built
indiscriminately upon a great variety of these foundations.

Chapter III

THE INTEGRATION OF CULTURE

The diversity of cultures can be endlessly documented. A
field of human behaviour may be ignored in some societies until
it barely exists ; it may even be in some cases unimagined.
Or it may almost monopolize the whole organized behaviour of
the society, and the most alien situations be manipulated only
in its terms. Traits having no intrinsic relation one with the
other, and historically independent, merge and become in-
extncable, providing the occasion for behaviour that has no
counterpart in regions that do not make these identifications. It
is a corollary of this that standards, no matter in what aspect of
behaviour, range in different cultures from the positive to the
negative pole. We might suppose that in the matter of taking
life all peoples would agree in condemnation. On the contrary,
in a matter of homicide, it may be held that one is blameless
if diplomatic relations have been severed between neighbouring
countries, or that one kills by custom his first two children, or
that a husband has right of life and death over his wife, or that
it is the duty of the child to kill his parents before they are old.
It may be that those are killed who steal a fowl, or who cut
their upper teeth first, or who are bom on a Wednesday. Among
some peoples a person suffers torments at having caused an
accidental death ; among others it is a matter of no consequence.
Suicide also may be a light matter, the recourse of anyone who
has suffered some slight rebuff, an act that occurs constantly in
a tribe. It may be the highest and noblest act a wise man can
perform. The very tale of it, on the other hand, may be a matter
for incredulous mirth, and the act itself impossible to conceive
as a human possibility. Or it may be a crime punishable by
law, or regarded as a sin against the gods.

The diversity of custom in the world is not, however, a matter
which we can only helplessly chronicle. Self-torture here, head-
hunting there, prenuptial chastity in one tribe and adolescent
Kcence in another, are not a list of unrelated facts, each of them
to be greeted with surprise wherever it is found or wherever it is
absent. The tabus on killing oneself or another, similarly, though
they relate to no absolute standard, are not therefore fortuitous.

THE integration OF CULTURE 33

The significance of cultural behaviour is not exhausted when we
have clearly understood that it is local and man-made and hugely
variable. It tends also to be integrated. A culture, like an
individual, is a more or less consistent pattern of thought and
action. Within each culture there come into being character-
istic purposes not necessarily shared by other types of society.
In obedience to these purposes, each people further and further
consolidates its experience, and in proportion to the urgency of
these drives the heterogeneous items of behaviour take more and
more congruous shape. Taken up by a well-integrated culture,
the most ill-assorted acts become characteristic of its peculiar
goals, often by the most unlikely metamorphoses. The form that
these acts take we can understand only by understanding first
the emotional and intellectual mainsprings of that society.

Such patterning of culture cannot be ignored as if it were an
unimportant detail. The whole, as modern science is insisting
in many fields, is not merely the sum of all its parts, but the
result of a unique arrangement and inter-relation of the parts
that has brought about a new entity. Gunpowder is not merely
the sum of sulphur and charcoal and saltpetre, and no amount
of knowledge even of all three of its elements in all the forms
they take in the natural world will demonstrate the nature of
gunpowder. New potentialities have come into being in the
resulting compound that were not present in its elements, and its
mode of behaviour is indefinitely changed from that of any of
its elements in other combinations.

Cultures, likewise, are more than the sum of their traits.
We may know all about the distribution of a tribe’s form of
marriage, ritual dances, and puberty initiations, and yet under-
stand nothing of the culture as a whole which has used these
elements to its own purpose. This purpose selects from among
the possible traits in the surrounding regions those which it can
use, and discards those which it cannot. Other traits it recasts
into conformity with its demands. The process, of course, need
never be conscious during its whole course, but to overlook it
in the study of the patternings of human behaviour is to renounce
the possibility of intelligent interpretation.

This integration of cultures is not in the least mystical. It
is the same process by which a style in art comes into being and
persists. Gothic architecture, beginning in what was hardly
more than a preference for altitude and light, became, by the
operation of some canon of taste that developed within its

PATTERNS OF CULTURE

34

technique, the unique and homogeneous art of the thirteenth
century. It discarded elements that were incongruous, modified
others to its purposes, and invented others that accorded with
its taste. When we describe the process historically, we inevitably
use animistic forms of expression as if there were choice and
purpose in the growth of this great art-form. But this is due to
the difficulty in our language-forms. There was no conscious
choice, and no purpose. What was at first no more than a
slight bias in local forms and techniques expressed itself more
and more forcibly, integrated itself in more and more definite
standards, and eventuated in Gothic art.

What has happened m the great art-styles happens also in
cultures as a whole. All the miscellaneous behaviour directed
towards getting a living, mating, warring, and worshipping the
gods, IS made over into consistent patterns in accordance with
unconscious canons of choice that develop within the culture.
Some cultures, like some periods of art, fail of such integration,
and about many others we know too little to understand the
motives that actuate them. But cultures at every level of com-
plexity, even the simplest, have achieved it. Such cultures are
more or less successful attainments of integrated behaviour,
and the marvel is that there can be so many of these possible
configurations.

Anthropological work has been overwhelmingly devoted to
the analysis of culture traits, however, rather than to the study
of cultures as articulated wholes. This has been due in great
measure to the nature of earlier ethnological descriptions. The
classical anthropologists did not write out of first-hand know-
ledge of primitive people. They were armchair students who
had at their disposal the anecdotes of travellers and missionaries
and the formal and schematic accounts of the early ethnologists.
It was possible to trace from these details the distribution of the
custom of knocking out teeth, or of divination by entrails, but
it was not possible to see how these traits were embedded in
different tribes in characteristic configurations that gave form
and meaning to the procedures.

Studies of culture like The Golden Bough and the usual com-
parative ethnological volumes are analytical discussions of traits
and ignore all the aspects of cultural integration. Mating or
death practices are illustrated by bits of behaviour selected
indiscriminately from the most different cultures, and the dis-
cussion builds up a kind of mechanical Frankenstein’s monster

THE INTEGRATION OF CULTURE 35

with a right eye from Fiji, a left from Europe, one leg from
Tierra del Fuego, and one from Tahiti, and all the fingers and
toes from still different regions. Such a figure corresponds to
no reality in the past or present, and the fundamental difficulty
is the same as if, let us say, psychiatry ended with a catalogue
of the symbols of which psychopathic individuals make use, and
ignored the study of patterns of symptomatic behaviour — schizo-
phrenia, hysteria, and manic-depression disorders — into which
they are built. The role of the trait in the behaviour of the
psychotic, the degree to which it is dynamic in the total person-
ality, and Its relation to all other items of experience, differ
completely. If we are interested in mental processes, we can
satisfy ourselves only by relating the particular symbol to the
total configuration of the individual.

There is as great an unreality in similar studies of culture.
If we are interested in cultural processes, the only way in which
we can know the significance of the selected detail of behaviour
is against the background of the motives and emotions and values
that are institutionalized in that culture. The first essential, so
it seems to-day, is to study the living culture, to know its habits of
thought and the functions of its institutions, and such knowledge
cannot come out of post-mortem dissections and reconstructions.

The necessity for functional studies of culture has been stressed
over and over again by Malinowski. He criticizes the usual
diffusion studies as post-mortem dissections of organisms we might
rather study in their living and functioning vitality. One of the
best and earliest of the full-length pictures of a primitive people
which have made modern ethnology possible is Malinowski’s
extended account of the Trobriand Islanders of Melanesia.
Malinowski, however, in his ethnological generalizations is con-
tent to emphasize that traits have a living context in the culture
of which they are a part, that they function. He then generalizes
the Trobriand traits — the importance of reciprocal obligations,
the local character of magic, the Trobriand domestic family — as
valid for the primitive world instead of recognizing the Trobriand
configuration as one of many observed types, each with its
characteristic arrangements in the economic, the religious, and
the domestic sphere.

The study of cultural behaviour, however, can no longer be
handled by equating particular local arrangements with the
generic primitive. Anthropologists are turning from the study
of primitive culture to that of primitive cultures, and the implica-

PATTERNS OF CULTURE

36

tions of this change from the singular to the plural are only just
beginning to be evident.

The importance of the study of the whole configuration as
over against the continued analysis of its parts is stressed in field
after field of modern science. Wilhelm Stern has made it basic in
his work in philosophy and psychology. He insists that the
undivided totality of the person must be the point of departure.
He criticizes the atomistic studies that have been almost universal
both in introspective and experimental psychology, and he sub-
stitutes investigation into the configuration of personality. The
whole Struktur school has devoted itself to work of this kind in
various fields. Worringer has shown how fundamental a dif-
ference this approach makes m the field of aesthetics. He con-
trasts the highly developed art of two periods, the Greek and
the Byzantine. The older criticism, he insists, which defined art
in absolute terms and identified it with the classical standards,
could not possibly understand the processes of art as they are
represented in Byzantine painting or mosaic. Achievement in
one cannot be judged in terms of the other, because each was
attempting to achieve quite different ends. The Greeks m their
art attempted to give expression to their own pleasure in activity ;
they sought to embody their identification of their vitality with
the objective world. Byzantine art, on the other hand, objecti-
fied abstraction, a profound feeling of separation in the face of
outside nature. Any understanding of the two must take account,
not only of comparisons of artistic ability, but far more of dif-
ferences of artistic intention. The two forms were contrasting,
integrated configurations, each of which could make use of forms
and standards that were incredible in the other.

The Gestalt (configuration) psychology has done some of the
most striking work in justifying the importance of this point of
departure from the whole rather than from its parts. Gestalt
psychologists have shown that in the simplest sense-perception
no analysis of the separate percepts can account for the total
experience. It is not enough to divide perceptions up into
objective fragments. The subjective framework, the forms pro-
vided by past experience, are crucial and cannot be omitted.
The wholeness-properties ’’ and the wholeness-tendencies ’’
must be studied in addition to the simple association mechanisms
with which psychology has been satisfied since the time of Locke.
The whole determines its parts, not only their relation but their
very nature. Between two wholes there is a discontinuity in kind,

THE INTEGRATION OF CULTURE

37

and any understanding must take account of their different
natures, over and above a recognition of the similar elements
that have entered into the two. The work in Gestalt psychology
has been chiefly in those fields where evidence can be experi-
mentally arrived at in the laboratory, but its implications reach
far beyond the simple demonstrations which are associated with
its work.

In the social sciences the importance of integration and
configuration was stressed in the last generation by Wilhelm
Dilthey. His primary interest was in the great philosophies and
interpretations of life. Especially in Die Typen der Weltanschauung
he analyses part of the history of thought to show the relativity
of philosophical systems. He sees them as great expressions of
the variety of life, moods, Lebensstimmungen^ integrated attitudes
the fundamental categories of which cannot be resolved one into
another. He argues vigorously against the assumption that any
one of them can be final. He does not formulate as cultural
the different attitudes he discusses, but because he takes for dis-
cussion great philosophical configurations, and historical periods
like that of Frederick the Great, his work has led naturally to
more and more conscious recognition of the role of culture.

This recognition has been given its most elaborate expression
by Oswald Spengler. His Decline of the West takes its title not
from its theme of destiny ideas, as he calls the dominant pattern-
ing of a civilization, but from a thesis which has no bearing
upon our present discussion, namely, that these cultural con-
figurations have, like any organism, a span of life they cannot
overpass. This thesis of the doom of civilizations is argued on
the basis of the shift of cultural centres in Western civilization
and the periodicity of high cultural achievement. He buttresses
this description with the analogy, which can never be more
than an analogy, with the birth- and death-cycle of living
organisms. Every civilization, he believes, has its lusty youth,
its strong manhood, and its disintegrating senescence.

It is this latter interpretation of history which is generally
identified with The Decline of the West, but Spengler’ s far more
valuable and original analysis is that of contrasting configurations
in Western civilization. He distinguishes two great destiny
ideas : the Apollonian of the classical world and the Faustian of
the modern world. Apollonian man conceived of his soul as a
cosmos ordered in a group of excellent parts There was no
place in his universe for will, and conflict was an evil which his

PATTERNS OF CULTURE

38

philosophy decried. The idea of an inward development of the
personality was alien to him, and he saw life as under the shadow
of catastrophe always brutally threatening from the outside.
His tragic climaxes were wanton destructions of the pleasant land-
scape of normal existence. The same event might have befallen
another individual in the same way and with the same results.

On the other hand, the Faustian's picture of himself is as a
force endlessly combating obstacles. His version of the course
of individual life is that of an inner development, and the catas-
trophes of existence come as the inevitable culmination of his past
choices and experiences. Conflict is the essence of existence.
Without it personal life has no meaning, and only the more
superficial values of existence can be attained. Faustian man
longs for the infinite, and his art attempts to reach out towards
it. Faustian and Apollonian are opposed interpretations of
existence, and the values that arise in the one are alien and
trivial to the other.

The civilization of the classical world was built upon the
Apollonian view of life, and the modern world has been working
out in all its institutions the implications of the Faustian view.
Spengler glances aside also at the Egyptian, ‘‘ which saw itself
as moving down a narrow and inexorably prescribed life-path
to come at last before the judges of the dead ", and at the Magian
with its strict dualism of body and soul. But his great subjects are
the Apollonian and the Faustian, and he considers mathematics,
architecture, music, and painting as expressing these two great
opposed philosophies of different periods of Western civilization.

The confused impression which is given by Spengler’s volumes
is due only partially to the manner of presentation. To an
even greater degree it is the consequence of the unresolved com-
plexities of the civilizations with which he deals. Western
civilizations, with their historical diversity, their stratification into
occupations and classes, their incomparable richness of detail,
are not yet well enough understood to be summarized under a
couple of catchwords. Outside of certain very restricted intel-
lectual and artistic circles, Faustian man, if he occurs, does not
have his own way with our civilization. There are the strong
men of action and the Babbitts as well as the Faustians, and
no ethnologically satisfactory picture of modern civilization can
ignore such constantly recurring types. It is quite as convincing
to characterize our cultural type as thoroughly extrovert, running
about in endless mundane activity, inventing, governing, and,

THE INTEGRATION OF CULTURE 39

as Edward Carpenter says, endlessly catching its trains as
It IS to characterize it as Faustian, with a longing for the infinite.

Anthropologically speaking, Spengler’s picture of world
civilizations suffers from the necessity under which he labours
of treating modern stratified society as if it had the essential
homogeneity of a folk culture. In our present state of knowledge,
the historical data of western European culture are too complex
and the social differentiation too thorough-going to yield to the
necessary analysis. However suggestive Spengler’s discussion of
Faustian man is for a study of European literature and philo-
sophy, and however just his emphasis upon the relativity of
values, his analysis cannot be final because other equally valid
pictures can be drawn. In the retrospect it may be possible to
characterize adequately a great and complex whole like Western
civilization, but in spite of the importance and the truth of
Spengler’s postulate of incommensurable destiny ideas, at the
present time the attempt to interpret the Western world in
terms of any one selected trait results in confusion.

It is one of the philosophical justifications for the study of
primitive peoples that the facts of simpler cultures may make
clear social facts that are otherwise baffling and not open to
demonstration. This is nowhere more true than in the matter
of the fundamental and distinctive cultural configurations that
pattern existence and condition the thoughts and emotions of
the individuals who participate in those cultures. The whole
problem of the formation of the individual’s habit-patterns under
the influence of traditional custom can best be understood at the
present time through the study of simpler peoples. This does
not mean that the facts and processes we can discover in this
way are limited in their application to primitive civilizations.
Cultural configurations are as compelling and as significant in
the highest and most complex societies of which we have know-
ledge. But the material is too intricate and too close to our
eyes for us to cope with it successfully.

The understanding we need of our own cultural processes
can most economically be arrived at by a detour. When the
historical relations of human beings and their immediate for-
bears in the animal kingdom were too involved to use in estab-
lishing the fact of biological evolution, Darwin made use instead
of the structure of beetles, and the process, which in the complex
physical organization of the human is confused, in the simpler
material was transparent in its cogency. It is the same in the

40 PATTERNS OF CULTURE

Study of cultural mechamsms. We need all the enlightenment
we can obtain from the study of thought and behaviour as it
is organized in the less complicated groups.

I have chosen three primitive civilizations to picture in some
detail. A few cultures understood as coherent organizations of
behaviour are more enlightening than many touched upon only
at their high spots. The relation of motivations and purposes
to the separate items of cultural behaviour at birth, at death, at
puberty, and at marriage can never be made clear by a com-
prehensive survey of the world. We must hold ourselves to
the less ambitious task, the many-sided understanding of a few
cultures.

Chapter IV

THE PUEBLOS OF NEW MEXICO

The Pueblo Indians of the South-West are one of the most
widely known primitive peoples in Western civilization. They
live in the midst of America, within easy reach of any trans-
continental traveller. And they are living after the old native
fashion. Their culture has not disintegrated like that of all the
Indian communities outside of Arizona and New Mexico. Month
by month and year by year, the old dances of the gods are
danced in their stone villages, life follows essentially the old
routines, and what they have taken from our civilization they
have remodelled and subordinated to their own attitudes.

They have a romantic history. All through that part of
America which they still inhabit are found the homes of their
cultural ancestors, the cliff-dwellings and great planned valley
cities of the golden age of the Pueblos. Their unbelievably
numerous cities were built in the twelfth and thirteenth cen-
turies, but we can follow their history much farther back to its
simple beginnings in one-room stone houses to each of which
an underground ceremonial chamber was attached. These early
Pueblo people, however, were not the first who had taken this
South-West desert for their home. An earlier people, the Basket-
makers, had lived there so long before that we cannot calculate
the period of their occupancy, and they were supplanted, and
perhaps largely exterminated, by the early Pueblo people.

The Pueblo culture flourished greatly after it had settled
upon its arid plateau. It had brought with it the bow and
arrow, a knowledge of stone architecture, and a diversified
agriculture. Why it chose for the site of its greatest develop-
ment the inhospitable, almost waterless valley of the San Juan,
which flows into the Colorado River from the north, no one
ventures to explain. It seems one of the most forbidding regions
in the whole of what is now the United States, yet it was here
that there grew up the greatest Indian cities north of Mexico.
These were of two kinds, and they seem to have been built by
the same civilization at the same period : the cliff-dweUings,
and the semicircular valley citadels. The cliff-dwellings dug
into the sheer face of the precipice, or built on a ledge hundreds

41

PATTERNS OF CULTURE

42

of feet from the valley floor, are some of the most romantic
habitations of mankind. We cannot guess what the circum-
stances were that led to the construction of these homes, far
from the cornfields and far from any water-supply, which must
have been serious if they were planned as fortifications, but
some of the rums enduringly challenge our admiration of ingenuity
and beauty. One thing is never omitted in them, no matter
how solid the rock ledge upon which the pueblo is built : the
underground ceremonial chamber, the kiva, is hewed out to
accommodate a man upright, and is large enough to serve as a
gathering-room. It is entered by a ladder through a hatchway.

The other type of dwelling was a prototype of the modern
planned city : a semicircular sweep of wall that rose three
stories at the fortified exterior and was terraced inward as it
approached the underground kivas that clustered in the embrace
of the great masonry arms. Some of these great valley cities of
this type have not only the small kivas, but one great additional
temple similar sunk into the earth and of the most finished and
perfect masonry.

The peak of Pueblo civilization had been reached and passed
before the Spanish adventurers came searching for cities of gold.
It seems likely that the Navajo-Apache tribes from the north
cut off the supplies of water from the cities of these ancient
peoples and overcame them. When the Spanish came, they
had already abandoned their cliff-dwellings and great semi-
circular cities and had settled along the Rio Grande in villages
they still occupy. Towards the west there were also Acoma,
Zuni, and Hopi, the great western Pueblos.

Pueblo culture, therefore, has a long homogeneous history
behind it, and we have special need of this knowledge of it
because the cultural life of these peoples is so at variance with
that of the rest of North America. Unfortunately archeology
cannot go further and tell us how it came about that here in
this small region of America a culture gradually differentiated
itself from all those that surrounded it and came always more
and more drastically to express a consistent and particular
attitude towards existence.

We cannot understand the Pueblo configuration of culture
without a certain acquaintance with their customs and modes
of living. Before we discuss their cultural goals, we must set
before ourselves briefly the framework of their society.

The Zuiii are a ceremonious people, a people who value

THE PUEBLOS OF NEW MEXICO 43

sobriety and inoffensiveness above all other virtues. Their
interest is centred upon their rich and complex ceremonial life.
Their cults of the masked gods, of healing, of the sun, of the
sacred fetishes, of war, of the dead, are formal and established
bodies of ritual with priestly officials and calendric observances.
No field of activity competes with ritual for foremost place in
their attention. Probably most grown men among the western
Pueblos give to it the greater part of their waking life. It
requires the memorizing of an amount of word-perfect ritual
that our less trained minds find staggering, and the performance
of neatly dovetailed ceremonies that are charted by the calendar
and complexly interlock all the different cults and the governing
body in endless formal procedure.

The ceremonial life not only demands their time ; it pre-
occupies their attention. Not only those who are responsible
for the ritual and those who take part in it, but all the people
of the pueblo, women and families who have nothing that
is, that have no ntual possessions, centre their daily conversation
about it. While it is in progress, they stand all day as spec-
tators. If a priest is ill, or if no rain comes during his retreat,
village gossip runs over and over his ceremonial mis-steps and
the implications of his failure. Did the priest of the masked
gods give offence to some supernatural being? Did he break
his retreat by going home to his wife before the days were up ?
These are the subjects of talk in the village for a fortnight. If
an impersonator wears a new feather on his mask, it eclipses all
talk of sheep or gardens or marriage or divorce.

This preoccupation with detail is logical enough. Zufii
religious practices are believed to be supernaturally powerful
in their own right. At every step of the way, if the procedure
is correct, the costume of the masked god traditional to the last
detail, the offerings unimpeachable, the words of the hours-long
prayers letter-perfect, the effect will follow according to man’s
desires. One has only, in the phrase they have always on their
tongues, to '' know how According to all the tenets of their
religion, it is a major matter if one of the eagle feathers of a
mask has been taken from the shoulder of the bird instead of
from the breast. Every detail has magical efficacy.

Zufii places great reliance upon imitative magic. In the
priests’ retreats for rain they roll round stones across the floor to
produce thunder, water is sprinkled to cause the rain, a bowl
of water is placed upon the altar that the springs may be full.

PATTERNS OF CULTURE

44

suds are beaten up from a native plant that clouds may pile
in the heavens, tobacco smoke is blown out that the gods may
not withhold their misty breath In the masked-god dances
mortals clothe themselves with the flesh ’’ of the supernaturals,
that is, their paint and their masks, and by this means the gods
are constrained to grant their blessings. Even the observances
that are less obviously in the realm of magic partake m Zuhi
thought of the same mechanistic efflcacy. One of the obliga-
tions that rest upon every priest or official during the time when
he is actively participating in religious observances is that of
feeling no anger. But anger is not tabu in order to facilitate
communication with a righteous god who can only be approached
by those with a clean heart. Its absence is a sign of concen-
tration upon supernatural affairs, a state of mind that constrains
the supernaturals and makes it impossible for them to with-
hold their share of the bargain. It has magical efficacy.

Their prayers also are formulas, the effectiveness of which
comes from their faithful rendition. The amount of traditional
prayer forms of this sort in Zuni can hardly be exaggerated.
Typically they describe in ritualistic language the whole course
of the reciter’s ceremonial obligations leading up to the present
culmination of the ceremony. They itemize the appointment
of the impersonator, the gathering of willow shoots for prayer-
sticks, the binding of the bird feathers to them with cotton
string, the painting of the sticks, the offenng to the gods of the
finished plume wands, the visits to sacred springs, the periods
of retreat. No less than the original religious act, the recital
must be meticulously correct.

Seeking yonder along the river courses
The ones who are our fatheis,

Male willow.

Female willow,

Four times cutting the straight young shoots,

To my house
I brought my road
This day

With my warm human hands
I took hold of them.

I gave my prayer-sticks human form.

With the striped cloud tail
Of the one who is my grandfather,

The male turkey,

With eagle’s thin cloud tail,

With the striped cloud wings
And massed cloud tails

THE PUEBLOS OF NEW MEXICO

45

Of all the birds of summer,

With these four times I gave my prayer-sticks human form.

With the flesh of the one who is my mother,

Cotton woman,

Even a poorly made cotton thread,

Four times encircling them and tying it about their bodies,

I gave my prayer-sticks human form.

With the flesh of the one who is our mother.

Black paint woman.

Four times covering them with flesh,

I gave my prayer-sticks human form

Prayer in Zuni is never an outpouring of the human heart.
There are some ordinary prayers that can be slightly varied,
but this means little more than that they can be made longer or
shorter. And the prayers are never remarkable for their inten-
sity. They are always mild and ceremonious in form, asking for
orderly life, pleasant days, shelter from violence. Even war
priests conclude their prayer :

I have sent forth my prayeis
Our children,

Even those who have erected their shelters
At the edge of the wilderness.

May their roads come m safely,

May the forests
And the brush

Stretch out their water-filled arms
To shield their hearts ,

May their roads come in safely ;

May their roads all be fulfilled.

May It not somehow become difficult for them
When they have gone but a little way.

May ail the little boys,

Ail the little girls,

And those whose roads are ahead.

May they have powerful hearts.

Strong spirits ,

On roads reaching to Dawn Lake
May you grow old ;

May your roads be fulfilled ,

May you be blessed with life

Where the life-giving road of your sun father comes out.

May your roads reach ;

May your roads be fulfilled.

If they are asked the purpose of any religious observance,
they have a ready answer. It is for rain. This is of course a
more or less conventional answer. But it reflects a deep-seated
Zuni attitude. Fertility is above all else the blessing within the
bestowal of the gods, and in the desert country of the Zuni
plateau, rain is the prime requisite for the growth of crops.

PATTERNS OF CULTURE

46

The retreats of the priests, the dances of the masked gods, even
many of the activities of the medicine societies are judged by
whether or not there has been rain. To “ bless with water ” is
the synonym of all blessing. Thus, in the prayers, the fixed
epithet the gods apply in blessing to the rooms in Zuni to which
they come, is “ water-filled ”, their ladders are “ water-ladders ”,
and the scalp taken in warfare is “ the water-filled covering
The dead, too, come back in the rain clouds, bringing the uni-
versal blessing. People say to the children when the summer
afternoon rain clouds come up the sky, “ Your grandfathers are
coming,” and the reference is not to individual dead relatives,
but applies impersonally to all forbears. The masked gods also
are the ram and when they dance they constrain their own being
— rain — to descend upon the people. The priests, again, in their
retreat before their altars sit motionless and withdrawn for eight
days, summoning the rain.

From wherever you abide permanently
You will make your roads come forth
Your little wind blown clouds.

Your thin wisp of clouds
Replete with living waters.

You will send forth to stay with us.

Your fine ram caressing the caith,

Here at Itiwana,^

The abiding place of our fathers,

Our mothers,

The ones who first had being,

With your great pile of waters
You wull come together.

Rain, however, is only one of the aspects of fertility for
which prayers are constantly made in Zuhi. Increase in the
gardens and increase in the tribe are thought of together. They
desire to be blessed with happy women :

Even those who are with child,

Carrying one child on the back,

Holding another on a cradle board,

Leading one by the hand,

With yet another going before

Their means of promoting human fertility are strangely symbolic
and impersonal, as we shall see, but fertility is one of the recog-
nized objects of Ibeligious observances.

This ceremonial life that preoccupies Zuni attention is
organized like a series of interlocking wheels. The priesthoods
have their sacred objects, their retreats, their dances, their

^ ** The Middle **, the ceremonial name of Zuni, the centre of the world.

THE PUEBLOS OF NEW MEXICO 47

prayers, and their year-long programme is annually initiated by
the great winter solstice ceremony that makes use of all the
different groups and sacred things and focuses all their functions.
The tribal masked-god society has similar possessions and
calendric observances, and these culminate in the great winter
tribal masked-god ceremony, the Shalako. In like fashion the
medicine societies, with their special relation to curing, function
throughout the year, and have their annual culminating cere-
mony for tribal health. These three major cults of Zuhi cere-
monial life are not mutually exclusive. A man may be, and
often is, for the greater part of his life, a member of all three.
They each give him sacred possessions to live by ’’ and demand
of him exacting ceremonial knowledge.

The priesthoods stand on the highest level of sanctity. There
are four major and eight minor priesthoods. They “ hold their
children ^ fast They are holy men. Their sacred medicine
bundles, m which their power resides, are, as Dr. Bunzel says,
of indescribable sanctity They are kept in great covered
jars, m bare, inner rooms of the priests’ houses, and they consist
of pairs of stoppered reeds, one filled with water, in which there
are miniature frogs, and the other with corn. The two are
wrapped together with yards and yards of unspun native cotton.
No one ever enters the holy room of the priests’ medicine bundle
except the priests when they go m for their rituals, and an
elder woman of the household or the youngest girl child, who
go in before every meal to feed the bundle. Anyone entering,
for either purpose, removes his moccasins.

The priests, as such, do not hold public ceremonies, though
in great numbers of the rites their presence is necessary or they
initiate essential first steps in the undertaking. Their retreats
before their sacred bundle are secret and sacrosanct. In June,
when rain is needed for the corn, at that time about a foot above
the ground, the series of retreats begins. In order, each new
priesthood going in ” as the preceding one comes out, they
“ make their days The heads of the sun cult and of the war
cult are included also in this series of the priests’ retreats. They
must sit motionless, with their thoughts fixed upon ceremonial
things, eight days for the major priesthoods, four for the lesser.
All Zuni awaits the granting of rain during these days, and
priests blessed with ram are greeted and thanked by everyone
upon the street after their retreat is ended. They have blessed

^ That IS, the people of Zuni

PATTERNS OF CULTURE

48

their people with more than ram. They have upheld them in
all their ways of life. Their position as guardians of their people
has been vindicated. The prayers they have prayed during
their retreat have been answered :

All my ladder-descending children.

All of them I hold in my hands,

May no one fall from my grasp
After going but a little way
Even every little beetle.

Even every dirty little beetle,

Let me hold them all fast in my hands,

Let none of them fall from my grasp
May my children’s roads all be fulfilled ,

May they giow old ;

May their roads reach all the way to Dawn Lake ,

May their roads be fulfilled ;

In order that your thoughts may bend to this
Your days are made

The heads of the major priesthoods, with the chief priest of
the sun cult and the two chief priests of the war cult, constitute
the ruling body, the council of Zuni. Zuhi is a theocracy to the
last implication. Since priests are holy men and must never
during the prosecution of their duties feel anger, nothing is
brought before them about which there will not be unanimous
agreement. They initiate the great ceremonial events of the
Zuhi calendar, they make ritual appointments, and they give
judgment in cases of witchcraft. To our sense of what a govern-
ing body should be, they are without jurisdiction and without
authority.

If the priesthoods stand on the level of greatest sanctity, the
cult of the masked gods is most popular. It has first claim in
Zum affection, and it flourishes to-day like the green bay tree.

There are two kinds of masked gods : the masked gods
proper, the kachinas ; and the kachina priests. These kaclima
priests are the chiefs of the supernatural world and are them-
selves impersonated with masks by Zum dancers. Their sanc-
tity in Zuni eyes makes it necessary that their cult should be
quite separate from that of the dancing gods proper. The
dancing gods are happy and comradely supernaturals who live
at the bottom of a lake far off in the empty desert south of Zuni.
There they are always dancing. But they like best to return
to Zuni to dance. To impersonate them, therefore, is to give
them the pleasure they most desire. A man, when he puts on
the mask of the god, becomes for the time being the super-

THE PUEBLOS OF NEW MEXICO 49

natural himself. He has no longer human speech, but only
the cry which is peculiar to that god. He is tabu, and must
assume all the obligations of anyone who is for the time being
sacred. He not only dances, but he observes an esoteric retreat
before the dance, and plants prayer-sticks and observes conti-
nence.

There are more than a hundred different masked gods of
the Zuni pantheon, and many of these are dance groups that
come in sets, thirty or forty of a kind. Others come m sets of
SIX, coloured for the six directions — ^for Zuni counts up and
down as cardinal points. Each of these gods has individual
details of costuming, an individual mask, an individual place
in the hierarchy of the gods, myths that recount his doings, and
ceremonies during which he is expected.

The dances of the masked gods are administered and carried
out by a tribal society of all adult males. Women too may
be initiated to save their lives ”, but it is not customary.
They are not excluded because of any tabu, but membership for
a woman is not customary, and there are to-day only three
women members. As far back as tradition reaches there seem
not to have been many more at any one time. The men^s
tribal society is organized in six groups, each with its kiva or
ceremonial chamber. Each kiva has its officials, its dances that
belong to it, and its own roll of members.

Membership in one or the other of these kivas follows from
the choice of a boy’s ceremonial father at birth, but there is
no initiation till the child is between five and nine years old.
It is his first attainment of ceremonial status. This initiation,
as Dr. Bunzel points out, does not teach him esoteric mysteries ;
it establishes a bond with supernatural forces. It makes him
strong, and, as they say, valuable. The scare kachinas ”, the
punitive masked gods, come for the initiation, and they whip
the children with their yucca whips. It is a rite of exorcism,

‘‘ to take off the bad happenings ”, and to make future events
propitious. In Zuni whipping is never used as a corrective of
children. The fact that white parents use it in punishment is
a matter for unending amazement. In the initiation children
are supposed to be very frightened, and they are not shamed if
they cry aloud. It makes the rite the more valuable.

Later, traditionally when the boy is about fourteen and old
enough to be responsible, he is whipped again by even stronger
masked gods. It is at this initiation that the kachina mask is

PATTERNS OF CULTURE

50

put upon his head, and it is revealed to him that the dancers,
instead of being the supernaturals from the Sacred Lake, are
in reality his neighbours and his relatives. After the final whip-
ping, the four tallest boys are made to stand face to face with
the scare kachinas who have whipped them. The priests lift
the masks from their heads and place them upon the heads
of the boys. It is the great revelation. The boys are terrified.
The yucca whips are taken from the hands of the scare kachinas
and put in the hands of the boys who face them, now with the
masks upon their heads. They are commanded to whip the
kachinas. It is their first object lesson in the truth that they,
as mortals, must exercise all the functions which the uninitiated
ascribe to the supernaturals themselves. The boys whip them,
four times on the right arm, four on the left, four times on the
right leg, four on the left. Afterwards the kachinas are whipped
in turn in the same way by all the boys, and the priests tell them
the long myth of the boy who let fall the secret that the kachinas
were merely impersonations and was killed by the masked gods.
They cut his head from his body and kicked it all the way to the
Sacred Lake. His body they left lying in the plaza. The boys
must never, never tell. They are now members of the cult
and may impersonate the masked gods.

They do not yet possess masks. They will not have masks
made until they are married men of some substance. Then a
man plants lavishly for the year and makes known to the head
of his kiva that he wishes the initiation of the mask. He is
whipped again by the kachinas who whipped him as a boy,
and feasts his kiva and those who have danced. His mask is
his, for he keeps it in his house and it makes his house valuable.
At his death it will be buried with him to ensure his joining
the troop of kachina dancers in the Sacred Lake. Any man,
however, who has not a mask borrows from those who have, at
any time, freely and without a return gift. He has it painted
to represent any kachina he chooses, for according as it is painted
and furnished with accessories, it may be used in the impersona-
tion of a large number of kachinas.

The cult of the kachina priests is quite diflferent. The masks
of kachina priests are not made up at request and refurbished
for different impersonators at each dance. They are permanent
masks which are surrounded by cult observances, and are second
in sanctity only to the medicine bundles of the major priesthoods.
They are owned and cared for, as those are, by family lines in the

THE PUEBLOS OF NEW MEXICO 5 1

same houses that have cared for them, they say, since the begin-
ning of the world. Each has its own cult group. These cults
are responsible for the impersonations of these masks whenever
they are required in the round of Zuhi ceremonials. These
permanent masks of the kachina priests are associated with the
long rituals that their impersonators memorize and deliver on
their appearance. Unlike the dancing kachinas, they do not
come to dance, but to perform definite ceremonial functions in
the calendnc ritual. It is they who come to whip the children
at initiation, who come at the great annual ceremony of Shalako,
who make the New Year ”, They are the counterpart, upon
the supernatural plane, of their daylight children the chief
priests of Zuni. They are the chief priests of the kachinas.

The third great division of the Zuni ceremonial structure is
that of the medicine societies. The supernatural patrons of the
medicine societies are the beast gods, chief of whom is the bear.
Just as the dancers impersonate the kachinas, the medicine
societies impersonate the bear. In place of a mask they pull
over their arms the skin of the forelegs of the bear with the claws
still in place. Just as the dancers utter only the cry of the
kachina, the impersonators of the beast gods growl, dangerously,
like the bear. It is the bear who has the supreme powers of
healing, and his powers are constrained, as in the case of the
kachinas, by the use of his bodily substance.

The medicine societies have great stores of esoteric know-
ledge, which bit by bit the member learns throughout his life.
Some of these esoteric techniques, like walking on red-hot coals,
or swallowing swords, are learned upon further initiation into
higher orders of the societies. The doctors are the highest
orders of all, those whose roads are finished ”. Those who
aspire to this degree must sit for years at the feet of those who
already know.

These medicine men are summoned in case of illness. But
the cure is made by virtue of powers belonging to the society
and lays upon the patient the obligation of participation in
these powers. For this reason he must later take up formal
membership in the group of the doctor who has healed him.
In other words, initiation into medicine societies is through a
cure from serious illness. Men and women alike are members.
For those who wish to join and are not ill, other ritual ways are
provided, but most persons join after an lUness. The i^itmtion
is expensive, so that usually years elapse before^^/i^|%sp:®

PATTERNS OF CULTURE

52

is consummated and the new heart is dramatically given to the
initiate.

The medicine societies have altars and sacred objects that
command a high place in Zuhi. The doctors have also a* per-
sonal fetish, a perfect ear of corn entirely covered with the most
valuable and beautiful feathers, the butt of the ear covered
with a fine basketry base. Throughout its owner’s life this is
brought out to be set up on every altar of his society, and it is
buried, dismantled of its precious feathers, with his body at
his death.

The great public ceremony of the medicine societies, the
tribal healing, is the culmination of their winter retreat, and
the high point of their functioning. On that night all societies
are convened in their society rooms, the altars are set up, and
the bear and the other beast gods are impersonated by the
members. Everyone goes ; it insures the removal of illnesses
and the achievement of sound bodily health.

In Zuni thought, war and hunting and clowning cults are
grouped with the medicine societies. There are naturally points
of difference. Only those who have killed someone join the
war society. The circumstances of the killing do not matter.
Anyone who has spilled blood must join to ‘‘ save his life ”,
that is, to escape the danger of having taken life. The cult
members have charge of the scalp-house and are the protectors
of the people. On them falls the duty of policing the village.
Like the members of the hunters’ society, they do not doctor
and only men are members. The clowning society, also, has
its characteristic differences, but it is thought of, nevertheless,
as belonging with the medicine societies.

No other aspect of existence seriously competes in Zuni
interest with the dances and the religious observances. Domestic
affairs like marriage and divorce are casually and individually
arranged. Zuni is a strongly socialized culture and not much
interested in those things that are matters for the individual to
attend to. Marriage is arranged almost without courtship.
Traditionally girls had few opportunities for speaking to a boy
alone, but in the evening when all the girls carried the water-jars
on their heads to the spring for water, a boy might waylay one
and ask for a drink. If she liked him she gave it to him. He
might ask her also to make him a throwing stick for the rabbit
hunt, and give her afterwards the rabbits he had killed. Boys
and girls were supposed to have no other meetings, and cer-

THE PUEBLOS OF NEW MEXICO

53

tainly there are many Zuhi women to-day who were married
with no more preliminary sex experience than this.

When the boy decides to ask her father for the girl, he goes
to her house. As in every Zuhi visit, he first tastes the food
that is set before him, and the father says to him, as he must say
to every visitor, “ Perhaps you came for something.’’ The boy
answers, “ Yes, I came thinJcmg of your daughter.” The father
calls his daughter, saying, '' I cannot speak for her. Let her
say.” If she is willing, the mother goes into the next room and
makes up the pallet and they retire together. Next day she
washes his hair. After four days she dresses in her best clothes
and carries a large basket of fine corn flour to his mother’s
house as a present. There are no further formalities and little
social interest is aroused in the affair.

If they are not happy together, and think of separating,
especially if they have no children that have lived, the wife
will make a point of going to serve at the ceremonial feasts.
When she has a tSte-a-tete with some eligible man they will
arrange a meeting. In Zuni it is never thought to be difficult
for a woman to acquire a new husband. There are fewer women
than men, and it is more dignified for a man to live with a
wife than to remain in his mother’s house. Men are perennially
willing. When the woman is satisfied that she will not be left
husbandless, she gathers together her husband’s possessions and
places them on the doorsill, in olden times on the roof by the
hatchway. There are not many : his extra pair of moccasins,
his dance skirt and sash, if he has them, his box of precious
feathers for prayer-sticks, his paint-pots for prayer-sticks and for
refurbishing masks. All his more important ceremonial pos-
sessions he has never brought from his mother’s house. When
he comes home in the evening he sees the little bundle, picks
it up and cries, and returns with it to his mother’s house. He
and his family weep and are regarded as unfortunate. But
the rearrangement of living-quarters is the subject of only fleeting
gossip. There is rarely an interplay of deep feeling. Husbands
and wives abide by the rules, and these rules hardly provide
for violent emotions, either of jealousy or of revenge, or of an
attachment that refuses to accept dismissal.

In spite of the casual nature of marriage and divorce, a
very large proportion of Zuni marriages endure through the
greater part of a lifetime. Bickering is not liked, and most
marriages are peaceful. The permanence of Zuni marriages is

PATTERNS OF CULTURE

54

the more striking because marriage, instead of being the social
form behind which all the forces of tradition are massed, as in
our culture, cuts directly across the most strongly institutionalized
social bond in Zuhi.

This is the matrilineal family, which is ceremonially united
in its ownership and care of the sacred fetishes. To the women
of the household, the grandmother and her sisters, her daughters
and their daughters, belong the house and the corn that is
stored in it. No matter what may happen to marriages, the
women of the household remain with the house for life. They
present a solid front. They care for and feed the sacred objects
that belong to them. They keep their secrets together. Their
husbands are outsiders, and it is their brothers, married now
into the houses of other clans, who are united with the household
in all affairs of moment. It is they who return for all the retreats
when the sacred objects of the house are set out before the altar.
It is they, not the women, who learn the word-perfect ritual
of their sacred bundle and perpetuate it. A man goes always,
for all important occasions, to his mother’s house, which, when
she dies, becomes his sister’s house, and if his marriage breaks
up, he returns to the same stronghold.

This blood-relationship group, rooted in the ownership of
the house, united in the care of sacred objects, is the important
group in Zuhi. It has permanence and important common
concerns. But it is not the economically functioning group.
Each married son, each married brother, spends his labour
upon the corn which will fill his wife’s store-room. Only when
his mother’s or sister’s house lacks male labour does he care for
the cornfield of his blood-relationship group. The economic
group is the household that lives together, the old grandmother
and her husband, her daughters and their husbands. These
husbands count in the economic group, though in the ceremonial
group they are outsiders.

For women there is no conflict. They have no allegiance
of any kind to their husbands’ groups. But for all men there
is double allegiance. They are husbands in one group and
brothers in another. Certainly in the more important families,
in those which care for permanent fetishes, a man’s allegiance
as brother has more social weight than his allegiance as husband.
In all families a man’s position derives, not, as with us, from
his position as breadwinner, but from his role in relation to the
sacred obiects of the household. The husband, with no such

THE PUEBLOS OF NEW MEXICO

55

relationship to the ceremonial possessions of his wife’s house to
trade upon, only gradually attains to position in the household
as his children grow to maturity. It is as their father, not as
provider or as their mother’s husband, that he finally attains
some authority in the household where he may have lived for
twenty years.

Economic affairs are always as comparatively unimportant
in Zuni as they are in determining the family alignments. Like
all the pueblos, and perhaps in greater degree than the rest,
Zuhi is rich. It has gardens and peach orchards and sheep and
silver and turquoise. These are important to a man when
they make it possible for him to have a mask made for himself,
or to pay for the learning of ritual, or to entertain the tribal
masked gods at the Shalako. For this last he must build a
new house for the gods to bless at housewarming. All that
year he must feed the cult members who build for him, he
must provide the great beams for the rafters, he must entertain
the whole tribe at the final ceremony. There are endless respon-
sibilities he must assume. For this purpose he will plant heavily
the year before and increase his herd. He will receive help
from his clan group, all of which he must return in kind. Riches
used in this way are of course indispensable to a man of prestige,
but neither he nor anyone else is concerned with the reckoning
of possessions, but with the ceremonial role which he has taken.
A “ valuable ” family, in native parlance, is always a family
which owns permanent fetishes, and a man of importance is
one who has undertaken many ceremonial roles.

All the traditional arrangements tend to make wealth play as
small a part as possible in the performance of ritual prerogatives.
Ceremonial objects, even though they are recognized personal
property and attained by the expenditure of money and effort,
are free to the use of anyone who can employ them. There
are many sacred things too dangerous to be handled except
by those who have qualified, but the tabus are not property
tabus. Hunting fetishes are owned in the hunters’ society, but
anyone who is going hunting may take them for his use. He
will have to assume the usual responsibilities for using holy
things ; he will have to plant prayer-sticks and be continent
and benevolent for four days. But he pays nothing, and those
who possess the fetishes as private property have no monopoly of
their supernatural powers. Similarly a man who has no mask
borrows one freely and is not thought of as a beggar or a suppliant.

56

PATTERNS OF CULTURE

Besides this unusual discontinuity between vested interests
and the ownership of ceremonial objects in Zuhi, other more
common arrangements make wealth of comparative unimport-
ance. Membership in a clan with numerous ceremonial pre-
rogatives outweighs wealth, and a poor man may be sought
repeatedly for ritual offices because he is of the required lineage.
Most ceremonial participation, in addition, is the responsibility of
a group of people. An individual acts in assuming ntual posts
as he does in all other affairs of life, as a member of a group.
He may be a comparatively poor man, but the household or
the kiva acting through him provides the ceremonial necessanes.
The group gams always from this participation because of the
great blessing that accrues to it, and the property owned by a
self-respecting individual is not the count on which he is admitted
to or denied ceremonial roles.

The Pueblos are a ceremonial people. But that is not the
essential fashion in which they are set off from the other peoples
of North America and Mexico. It goes much deeper than any
difference in degree in the amount of ritual that is current
among them. The Aztec civihzation of Mexico was as rituahstic
as the Pueblo, and even the Plains Indians with their sun dance
and their men’s societies, their tobacco orders and their war
rituals, had a rich ceremonialism.

The basic contrast between the Pueblos and the other cultures
of North America is the contrast that is named and described
by Nietzsche in his studies of Greek tragedy. He discusses two
diametrically opposed ways of arriving at the values of existence.
The Dionysian pursues them through “ the annihilation of the
ordinary bounds and limits of existence ” ; he seeks to attain
in his most valued moments escape from the boundaries imposed
upon him by his five senses, to break through into another order
of experience. The desire of the Dionysian, in personal experi-
ence or in ritual, is to press through it towards a certain psycho-
logical state, to achieve excess. The closest analogy to the
emotions he sees is drunkenness, and he values the illuminations
of frenzy. With Blake, he believes “ the path of excess leads
to the palace of wisdom ”. The Apollonian distrusts all this,
and has often little idea of the nature of such experiences. He
finds means to outlaw them from his conscious life. He “ knows
but one law, measure in the Hellenic sense ”. He keeps the
middle of the road, stays within the known map, does not meddle

THE PUEBLOS OF NEW MEXICO 57

with disruptive psychological states. In Nietzsche’s fine phrase,
even in the exaltation of the dance he remains what he is,
and retains his civic name

The South-West Pueblos are Apollonian. Not all of Nietz-
sche’s discussion of the contrast between Apollonian and Diony-
sian applies to the contrast between the Pueblos and the
surrounding peoples. The fragments I have quoted are faithful
descriptions, but there were refinements of the types in Greece
that do not occur among the Indians of the South-West, and
among these latter, again, there are refinements that did not
occur in Greece. It is with no thought of equating the civiliza-
tion of Greece with that of aboriginal America that I use, in
describing the cultural configurations of the latter, terms borrowed
from the culture of Greece. I use them because they are cate-
gories that bring clearly to the fore the major qualities that
differentiate Pueblo culture from those of other American Indians,
not because all the attitudes that are found in Greece are found
also in aboriginal America.

Apollonian institutions have been carried much further in
the pueblos than in Greece. Greece was by no means as single-
minded. In particular, Greece did not carry out as the Pueblos
have the distrust of individualism that the Apollonian way of
life implies, but which in Greece was scanted because of forces
with which It came in conflict. Zuni ideals and institutions
on the other hand are rigorous on this point. The known map,
the middle of the road, to any Apollonian is embodied in the
common tradition of his people. To stay always within it is to
commit himself to precedent, to tradition. Therefore those
influences that are powerful against tradition are uncongenial
and minimized in their institutions, and the greatest of these
is individualism. It is disruptive, according to Apollonian philo-
sophy in the South-West, even when it refines upon and enlarges
the tradition itself. That is not to say that the Pueblos prevent
this. No culture can protect itself from additions and changes.
But the process by which these come is suspect and cloaked, and
institutions that would give individuals a free hand are outlawed.

It is not possible to understand Pueblo attitudes towards
life without some knowledge of the culture from which they
have detached themselves : that of the rest of North America.
It is by the force of the contrast that we can calculate the strength
of their opposite drive and the resistances that have kept out
of the Pueblos the most characteristic traits of the American

58 PATTERNS OF CULTURE

aborigines. For the American Indians as a whole, and including
those of Mexico, were passionately Dionysian. They valued all
violent experience, all means by which human beings may break
through the usual sensory routine, and to all such experiences
they attributed the highest value.

The Indians of North America outside the Pueblos have,
of course, anything but a uniform culture. They contrast
violently at almost every point, and there are eight of them
that it IS convenient to differentiate as separate culture areas.
But throughout them all, m one or another guise, there run
certain fundamental Dionysian practices. The most conspicuous
of these is probably their practice of obtaining supernatural
power in a dream or vision, of which we have already spoken.
On the western plains men sought these visions with hideous
tortures. They cut strips from the skin of their arms, they
struck off fingers, they swung themselves from tall poles by
straps inserted under the muscles of their shoulders. They went
without food and water for extreme periods. They sought m
every way to achieve an order of experience set apart from
daily living. It was grown men, on the plains, who went out
after visions. Sometimes they stood motionless, their hands tied
behind them, or they staked out a tiny spot from which they
could not move till they had received their blessing. Sometimes,
in other tribes, they wandered over distant regions, far out
into dangerous country. Some tribes chose precipices and places
especially - associated with danger. At all events a man went
alone, or, if he was seeking his vision by torture and someone
had to go out with him to tie him to the pole from which he
was to swing till he had his supernatural experience, his helper
did his part and left him alone for his ordeal.

It was necessary to keep one’s mind fixed upon the expected
visitation. Concentration was the technique above all others
upon which they relied. ‘‘ Keep thinking it all the time,” the
old medicine men said always. Sometimes it was necessary to
keep the face wet with tears so that the spirits would pity the
sufferer, and grant him his request. ‘‘ I am a poor man. Pity
me,” is a constant prayer. Have nothing,” the medicine men
taught, and the spirits will come to you.”

On the western plains they believed that when the vision
came it determined their life and the success they might expect.
If no vision came, they were doomed to failure. I was going
to be poor ; that is why I had no vision.” If the experience

THE PUEBLOS OF NEW MEXICO

59

was of curing, one had curing powers, if of warfare, one had
warrior’s powers. If one encountered Double Woman, one was
a transvestist and took woman’s occupations and habits. If
one was blessed by the mythical Water Serpent, one had super-
natural power for evil and sacrificed the lives of one’s wife and
children in payment for becoming a sorcerer. Any man who
desired general strengthening or success m particular ventures
sought visions often. They were necessary for warpaths and for
curings and for all kinds of miscellaneous occasions : calling
the buffalo, naming children, mourning, revenge, finding lost
articles.

When the vision came, it might be visual or auditory hallu-
cination, but it need not be. Most of the accounts tell of the
appearance of some animal. When it first appeared it was often
m human form, and it talked with the suppliant and gave him
a song and a formula for some supernatural practice As it
was leaving, it turned into an animal, and the suppliant knew
what animal it was that had blessed him, and what skin or bone
or feathers he must get to keep as a memento of the experience
and preserve for life as his sacred medicine bundle. On the
other hand some experiences were much more casual. There
were tribes that valued especially moments of intimacy with
nature, occasions when a person alone by the edge of a river
or following the trail felt in some otherwise simple event a
compelling significance.

It might be from a dream that the supernatural power came
to them. Some of the accounts of visions are unmistakable
dream experiences, whether they occurred in sleep or under less
normal conditions. Some tribes valued the dreams of sleep
more highly than any other experiences. Lewis and Clark com-
plained when they crossed the western plains in the early days
that no night was fit for sleeping ; some old man was always
rousing to beat on his drum and ceremonially rehearse the
dream he had just had. It was a valuable source of power.

In any case the criterion of whether or not the experience
had power was necessarily a matter for the individual to decide.
It was recognized as subjective, no matter what other social
curbs were imposed upon its subsequent practice. Some experi-
ences had power and some had not, and they distinguished by
the flash of significance that singled out those that were valuable.
If it did not communicate this thrill, an experience they had
sought even with torture was counted valueless, and they dared

6o

PATTERNS OF CULTURE

not claim power from it for fear that the animal claimed as
guardian spirit would visit death and disgrace upon them.

This belief in the power of a vision experience on the western
plains is a cultural mechanism which gives a theoretically un-
limited freedom to the individual. He might go out and get
this supremely coveted power^ no matter to what family he
belonged. Besides this, be might claim his vision as authority
for any innovation, any personal advantage which he might
imagine, and this authority he invoked was an experience in
solitude which in the nature of the case could not be judged
by another person. It was, moreover, probably the experience
of greatest instability that he could achieve. It gave individual
initiative a scope which is not easily equalled. Practically, of
course, the authority of custom remained unchallenged. Even
given the freest scope by their institutions, men are never inven-
tive enough to make more than minute changes. From the
point of view of an outsider the most radical innovations in
any culture amount to no more than a minor revision, and it
is a commonplace that prophets have been put to death for
the difference between Tweedledum and Tweedledee. In the
same way, the cultural licence that the vision gave was used
to establish, according to the instructions of the vision, a Straw-
berry Order of the Tobacco Society where before there had
been a Snowbird Order, or the power of the skunk in warfare
where the usual reliance was upon the buffalo. Other limita-
tions were also inevitable. The emphasis might be placed upon
trying out the vision. Only those could claim supernatural
power for war who had put their vision to the test and had led
a successful war party. In some tribes even the proposition to
put the vision to the test had to go before the elders, and the
body of elders was guided by no mystic communications.

In cultures other than those of the western plains these
limitations upon Dionysian practices were* carried much further.
Wherever vested rights and privileges were important in any
community the conflict occasioned by such a cultural trait as
the vision is obvious enough. It is a frankly disruptive cultural
mechanism. In tribes where the conflict was strong a number
of things might happen. The supernatural experience, to which
they still gave lip service, might become an empty shell. If
prestige was vested in cult groups and in families, these could
not afford to grant individuals free access to the supernatural
and teach them that all power came from such contact. There

THE PUEBLOS OF NEW MEXICO 6 1

was no reason why they could not still teach the dogma of the
free and open vision, and they did. But it was an hypocrisy.
No man could exercise power by any authority except that of
succession to his father’s place in the cult in which he had member-
ship. Among the Omaha, although all power passed down
strictly within the family line and was valued for the sorcery
that it was, they did not revise their traditional dogma of abso-
lute and sole dependence upon the solitary vision as a sanction
for supernatural power. On the North-West Coast, and among
the Aztecs of Mexico, where prestige was also a guarded privilege,
different compromises occurred, but they were compromises
which did not outlaw the Dionysian values.

The Dionysian bent in the North American vision quest,
however, did not usually have to make compromise with prestige
groups and their privileges. The experience was often sought
openly by means of drugs and alcohol. Among the Indian
tribes of Mexico the fermented juice of the fruit of the giant
cactus was used ceremonially to obtain the blessed state which
was to them supremely religious. The great ceremony of the
year among the related Pima, by means of which all blessings
were obtained, was the brewing of this cactus beer. The priests
drank first, and then all the people, “ to get religious Intoxi-
cation, in their practice and in their poetry, is the synonym
of religion. It has the same mingling of clouded vision and of
insight. It gives the whole tribe, together, the exaltation that
it associated with religion.

Drugs were much commoner means of attaining this experi-
ence. The peyote or mescal bean is a cactus button from the
highlands of Mexico. The plant is eaten fresh by the Indian
tribes within pilgrimage distance, but the button is traded as
far as the Canadian border. It is always used ceremonially.
Its effect is well known. It gives peculiar sensations of levitation
and brilliant colour images, and is accompanied by very strong
affect, either ultimate despair or release from all inadequacy
and insecurity. There is no motor disturbance and no erotic
excitation.

The cult of the peyote among the American Indians is still
spreading. It is incorporated as the Indian Church in Okla-
homa and among many tribes the older tribal rituals have
paled before this cult.^ It is associated everywhere with some
attitude towards the whites, either a religious opposition to
their influence, or a doctrine of speedy acceptance of white

62

PATTERNS OF CULTURE

ways, and it has many Christian elements woven into its fabric.
The peyote is passed and eaten m the manner of the sacrament,
first the peyote, then the water, round and round, with songs
and prayers. It is a dignified all-night ceremony, and the
effects prolong themselves during the following day. In other
cases it is eaten for four nights, with four days given up to the
excitation. Peyote, within the cults that espouse it, is identified
with god. A large button of it is placed upon the ground altar
and worshipped. All good comes from it. It is the only
holy thing I have known in my life “ this medicine alone
IS holy, and has rid me of all evil.” And it is the Dionysian
experience of the peyote trance that constitutes its appeal and
its religious authority

The datura or the jimson weed is a more drastic poison.
It is more local, being used in Mexico and among the tribes of
Southern California. In this latter region it was given to boys
at initiation, and under its influence they received their visions.

I have been told of boys who died as a result of the drink. The
boys were comatose, and some tribes speak of this condition
continuing for one day and some for four. The Mojave, the
eastern neighbours of these tribes, used datura to get luck m
gambling and were said to be unconscious for four days. During
this time the dream came which gave them the luck they sought.

Everywhere among the North American Indians, therefore,
except in the South-West Pueblos, we encounter this Dionysian
dogma and practice of the vision-dream from which comes
supernatural power. The South-West is surrounded by peoples
who seek the vision by fasting, by torture, by drugs and alcohol.
But the Pueblos do not accept disruptive experiences and they
do not derive supernatural power from them. If a Zuni Indian
has by chance a visual or auditory hallucination it is regarded
as a sign of death. It is an experience to avoid, not one to
seek by fasting. Supernatural power among the Pueblos comes
from cult membership, a membership which has been bought
and paid for and which involves the learning of verbatim ritual.
There is no occasion when they are expected to overpass the
boundaries of sobriety either in preparation for membership,
or in initiation, or in the subsequent rise, by payment, to the
higher grades, or in the exercise of religious prerogatives. They
do not seek or value excess. Nevertheless the elements out of
which the widespread vision quest is built up are present the
seeking of dangerous places, the friendship with a bird or animal,

THE PUEBLOS OF NEW MEXICO 63

fasting, the belief m special blessings from supernatural encounters.
But they are no longer integrated as a Dionysian experience.
There is complete reinterpretation. Among the Pueblos men
go out at night to feared or sacred places and listen for a voice,
not that they may break through to communication with the
supernatural, but that they may take the omens of good luck
and bad. It is regarded as a minor ordeal during which they
are badly frightened, and the great tabu connected with it is
that they must not look behind on the way home, no matter
what seems to be following. The objective performance is much
the same as in the vision quest ; in each case, they go out during
the preparation for a difficult undertaking — m the South-West,
often a foot-race — ‘and make capital of the darkness, the solitari-
ness, the appearance of animals. But the experience which is
elsewhere conceived as Dionysian, among the Pueblos is a
mechanical taking of omens.

Fasting, the technique upon which the American Indian
most depended in attaining a self-induced vision, has received
the same sort of reinterpretation. It is no longer utilized to
dredge up experiences that normally lie below the level of con-
sciousness , among the Pueblos it is a requirement for ceremonial
cleanness. Nothing could be more unexpected to a Pueblo
Indian than any theory of a connection between fasting and
any sort of exaltation. Fasting is required during all priestly
retreats, before participation in a dance, in a race, and on endless
ceremonial occasions, but it is never followed by power- giving
experience ; it is never Dionysian.

The fate of the j'lmson-weed poisoning in the South-West
pueblos is much like that of the technique of fasting. The
practice is present, but its teeth are drawn. The one-to-four-day
jimson-weed trances of the Indians of Southern California are
not for them. The drug is used as it was in ancient Mexico
in order to discover a thief. In Zuhi the man who is to take
the drug has a small quantity put into his mouth by the officiating
priest, who then retires to the next room and listens for the
incriminating name from the lips of the man who has taken the
jimson-weed. He is not supposed to be comatose at any time ;
he alternately sleeps and walks about the room. In the morning
he is said to have no memory of the insight he has received. The
chief care is to remove every trace of the drug and two common
desacratizing techniques are employed to take away the danger-
ous sacredness of the plant : first, he is given an emetic, four

PATTERNS OF CULTURE

64

times, till every vestige of the drug is supposed to be ejected ;
then his hair is washed in yucca suds. The other Zuhi use of
jimson weed is even further from any Dionysian purpose ;
members of the priestly orders go out at night to plant prayer-
sticks on certain occasions to ask the birds to sing for ram
and at such times a minute quantity of the powdered root is
put into the eyes, ears, and mouth of each priest. Here all
connections with the physical properties of the drug are lost
sight of.

Peyote has had an even more drastic fate. The Pueblos
are close to the Mexican plateau where the peyote button is
obtained, and the Apache and the tribes of the plains with
which they came most in contact were peyote-eaters. But the
practice gained no foothold in the pueblos. A small anti-
government group m Taos, the most atypical and Plains-like
of the Pueblos, has recently taken it up. But elsewhere it has
never been accepted. In their strict Apollonian ethos^ the Pueblos
distrust and reject those experiences which take the individual
in any way out of bounds and forfeit his sobnety.

This repugnance is so strong that it has even been sufficient
to keep American alcohol from becoming an administrative
problem. Everywhere else on Indian reservations m the United
States alcohol is an inescapable issue. There are no government
regulations that can cope with the Indian’s passion for whisky.
But m the pueblos the problem has never been important.
They did not brew any native intoxicant m the old days, nor do
they now. Nor is it a matter of course, as it is for instance with
the near-by Apaches, that every trip to town, for old men or
young, is a debauch. It is not that the Pueblos have a religious
tabu against drinking. It is deeper than that. Drunkenness is
repulsive to them. In Zuhi after the early introduction of
liquor, the old men voluntarily outlawed it, and the rule was
congenial enough to be honoured.

Torture was even more consistently rejected. The Pueblos,
especially the eastern Pueblos, were in contact with two very
different cultures in which self-torture was of the greatest import-
ance, the Plains Indians and the Mexican Pemtentes. Pueblo
culture also shares many traits with the now extinct torture-
using civilization of ancient Mexico, where on all occasions one
drew blood from parts of one’s own body, especially from the
tongue, as an offering to the gods. On the plains, self-torture
was specialized as a technique for obtaining states of self-oblivion

THE PUEBLOS OF NEW MEXICO 65

during which one obtained a vision. The Pemtentes of New
Mexico are the last surviving sect, in a far corner of the world, of
the Flagellants of mediaeval Spain, and they have retained to
the present day the Good Friday observances of identification
with the crucified Saviour. The climax of the rite is the cruci-
fixion of the Christ, impersonated by one of the members of
the cult. The procession emerges from the house of the Peni-
tentes at dawn of Good Friday, the Christ staggering under the
weight of the tremendous cross. Behind him are his brethren
with bared backs who lash themselves at every slow step with
their great whips of bayonet cactus to which are fastened barbs
of the cholla From a distance their backs look as if covered
with a rich red cloth. The ‘‘ way ” is about a mile and a half,
and when they reach the end the Christ is bound upon the
cross and raised. If he, or one of the whippers, dies, his shoes are
placed upon his doorstep, and no mourning is allowed for him.

The Pueblos do not understand self-torture. Every man’s
hand has its five fingers, and unless they have been tortured
to secure a sorcery confession they are unscarred. There are
no cicatrices upon their backs, no marks where strips of skin
have been taken off. They have no rites in which they sacrifice
their own blood, or use it for fertility. They used to hurt them-
selves to a certain extent in a few initiations at the moments
of greatest excitement, but m such cases the whole matter was
almost an affair of collegiate exuberance. In the Cactus Society,
a warrior cult, they dashed about striking themselves and each
other with cactus-blade whips ; in the Fire Society they tossed
fire about like confetti. Neither psychic danger nor abnormal
experience is soughj: in either case. Certainly in the observed
fire triejes of the Pueblos — as also in the fire tricks of the Plains
— It is not self-torture that is sought. In the Fire Walk, what-
ever the means employed, feet are not burned, and when the
fire is taken into the mouth the tongue is not blistered.

The Pueblo practice of beating with stripes is likewise with-
out intent to torture. The lash does not draw blood. Far
from glorying in any such excesses, as the Plains Indians do, a
Zuni child, whipped at adolescence or earlier, at the tribal
initiation, may cry out and even call for his mother when he
is struck by the initiating masked gods. The adults repudiate
with distress the idea that the whips might raise welts. Whip-
ping is '' to take off the bad happenings ” ; that is, it is a trusted
rite of exorcism. The fact that it is the same act that is used

66

PATTERNS OF CULTURE

elsewhere for self-torture has no bearing upon the use that is
made of it in this culture.

If ecstasy is not sought by fasting, by torture, or by drugs
or alcohol, or under the guise of the vision, neither is it induced
m the dance. Perhaps no people in North America spend more
time in the dance than the South-West Pueblos. But their
object in it never is to attain self-oblivion. It is by the frenzy of
the dance that the Greek cult of Dionysus was best known, and
it recurs over and over in North America The Ghost Dance of
the Indians that swept the country in the 1870’s was a round
dance danced monotonously till the dancers, one after the other,
fell rigid, prostrate on the ground. During their seizure they
had visions of deliverance from the whites, and meanwhile the
dance continued and others fell. It was the custom in most
of the dozens of tribes to which it penetrated to hold the dance
every Sunday. There were other and older dances also that
were thoroughly Dionysian. The tribes of northern Mexico
danced, frothing at the mouth, upon the altar. The shamans’
dances of California required a cataleptic seizure. The Maidu
used to hold shamans’ contests in which that one was victor
who danced down the others ; that is, who did not succumb
to the hypnotic suggestions of the dance. On the North-West
Coast the whole winter ceremonial was thought of as being
designed to tame the man who had returned mad and possessed
by the spirits. The initiates played out their role with the
frenzy that was expected of them. They danced like Siberian
shamans, tethered by four ropes strung to the four directions
so that they could be controlled if they ran into harm to them-
selves or others.

Of all this there is no suggestion in all the dance occasions
of Zuhi. The dance, like their ritual poetry, is a monotonous
compulsion of natural forces by reiteration. The tireless pound-
ing of their feet draws together the mist in the sky and heaps
It into the piled ram clouds. It forces out the rain upon the
earth. They are bent not at all upon an ecstatic experience,
but upon so thoroughgoing an identification with nature that
the forces of nature will swing to their purposes. This intent
dictates the form and spirit of Pueblo dances. There is nothing
wild about them. It is the cumulative force of the rhythm, the
perfection of forty men moving as one, that makes them effective.

No one has conveyed this quality of Pueblo dancing more
precisely than D. H, Lawrence.

THE PUEBLOS OF NEW MEXICO 67

All the men sing in unison, as they move with the soft, yet heavy
bird tread which is the whole of the dance, with bodies bent a little
forward, shoulders and heads loose and heavy, feet powerful but soft,
the men tread the rhythm into the centre of the earth. The drums
keep up the pulsating heart beat and for hours, hours, it goes on

Sometimes they are dancing the sprouting corn up out of the
earth, sometimes they are calling the game animals by the
tramp of their feet, sometimes they are constraining the white
cumulus clouds that are slowly piling up the sky on a desert
afternoon. Even the presence of these in the sky, whether or
not they vouchsafe ram, is a blessing from the supernaturals
upon the dance, a sign that their rite is accepted. If rain comes,
that is the sign and seal of the power of their dance. It is the
answer. They dance on through the swift South-West downpour,
their feathers wet and heavy, their embroidered kilts and mantles
drenched. But they have been favoured by the gods. The
clowns make merry in the deep adobe mud, sliding at full length m
the puddles and paddling in the half-liquid earth. It is their
recognition that their feet in the dance have the compulsion of
natural forces upon the storm clouds and have been powerful
to bring the ram.

Even where the Pueblos share with their near neighbours
dance patterns the very forms of which are instinct with Diony-
sian meaning, they are used among the Pueblos with complete
sobnety. The Cora of northern Mexico have a whirling dance,
like so many other tribes of that part of the country, and the
climax of It comes when the dancer, having reached the greatest
velocity and obliviousness of which he is capable, whirls back
and back and upon the very ground altar itself. At any other
moment, on any other occasion, this is sacnlege. But of such
things the highest Dionysian values are made. In his madness
the altar is destroyed, trampled into the sand again. At the
end the dancer falls upon the destroyed altar.

In the sets of dances m the underground kiva chamber in
the Hopi Snake Dance they also dance upon the altar. But
there is no frenzy. It is prescribed, like a movement of a Vir-
ginia Reel. One of the commonest formal dance patterns of
the Pueblos is built up of the alternation of two dance groups
who in each set vary a similar theme, appearing from alternate
sides of the dancing space. Finally for the last set the two
come out simultaneously from both directions. In this kiva
snake dance, the Antelope Society dancers are opposed to the

G8

PATTERNS OF CULTURE

Snake dancers. In the first set the Antelope priest dances,
squatting, the circuit of the altar, and retires. The Snake priest
repeats. In the second set Antelope receives a vine in his mouth
and dances before the initiates, trailing it over their knees. He
retires. Snake follows, receiving a live rattlesnake in his mouth
in the same fashion and trailing it over the initiates’ knees.
In the final set Antelope and Snake come out together, still
in the squatting position, and dance not the circuit of the altar
but upon It, ending the dance. It is a formal sequence like
that of a Morris dance, and it is danced in complete sobriety.

Nor is the dancing with snakes a courting of the dangerous
and the teirible in Hopi. There is current in our civilization
so common a horror of snakes that we misread the Snake Dance.
We readily attribute to the danceis the emotions we should feel
in like case. But snakes are not often regarded with horror by
the American Indians. They are often levcrenced, and occasion-
ally their holiness makes them dangerous, as anything may be
that is sacred or mamtou. But our unreasoned repulsion is no
part of their reaction. Nor are snakes especially feared for their
attack. There are Indian folk-tales that end, and that is why
the rattlesnake is not dangerous The habits of the rattle-
snake make it easy to subdue and Indians readily cope with it.
The feeling tone of the dancers towards the snakes m the Snake
Dance is not that of unholy dread or repulsion, but that of cult
members towards their animal patron. Moreover, it has been
repeatedly verified that the poison sacs of the rattlesnakes are
removed for the dance. They are bruised or pinched out, and
when the snakes are released after the dance, the sacs grow
again and fill with poison as before. But for the period of the
dance the snakes are harmless. The situation, therefore, in the
mind of the Hopi dancer is not Dionysian either in its secular
or in its supernatural aspect. It is an excellent example of the
fact that the same objective behaviour may be, according to
inculcated ideas, either a Dionysian courting of dangerous and
repulsive experience, or a sober and formal ceremonial.

Whether by the use of drugs, of alcohol, of fasting, of torture,
or of the dance, no experiences are sought or tolerated among
the Pueblos that are outside of ordinary sensory routine. The
Pueblos will have nothing to do with disruptive individual experi-
ences of this type. The love of moderation to which their
civilization is committed has no place for them. Therefore they
have no shamans.

THE PUEBLOS OF NEW MEXICO 69

Shamanism is one of the most general human institutions.
The shaman is the religious practitioner who, by whatever kind
of persona] experience is recognized as supernatural in his tribe,
gets his power directly from the gods. He is often, like Cassandra
and others of those who spoke with tongues, a person whose
instability has marked him out for his profession. In North
America shamans are characteristically those who have the
experience of the vision. The priest, on the other hand, is
the depository of ritual and the administrator of cult activities.
The Pueblos have no shamans ; they have only priests.

The Zuhi priest holds his position because of relationship
claims, or because he has bought his way up through various
orders of a society, or because he has been chosen by the chief
priests to serve for the year as impersonator of the kachina priests.
In any case he has qualified by learning a vast quantity of ritual,
both of act and of word. All his authority is derived from the
office he holds, from the ritual he administers. It must be
word-perfect, and he is responsible for the traditional correctness
of each complicated ceremony he performs. The Zuhi phrase for
a person with power is ‘'one who knows how ’h There are
persons who “ know how ’’ in the most sacred cults, in racing,
in gambling, and in healing. In other words, they have learned
their power verbatim from traditional sources. There is no point
at which they are licensed to claim the power of their religion
as the sanction for any act of their own initiative. They may
not even approach the supernatural except with group warrant
at stated intervals. Every prayer, every cult act, is performed
at an authorized and universally known season, and^ in the
traditional fashion. The most individual religious act in Zuni
is the planting of prayer-sticks, those delicately fashioned offer-
ings to the gods which are half-buried m sacred places and
carry their specific prayer to the supernaturals. But even prayer-
sticks may not be offered on the initiative even of the highest
priests. One of the folk-tales tells of the chief priest of Zuhi
who made prayer-sticks and went out to bury them. It was
not the time of the moon when prayer-sticks are planted by
the members of the medicine societies, and the people said. Why
does the chief priest plant prayer-sticks? He must be con-
juring.’’ As a matter of fact, he was using his power for a
private revenge. If the most personal of all religious acts may
not be performed on the private initiative even of the chief priest,
more formal acts are doubly fenced about with public sanctions.

70 PATTERNS OF CULTURE

No one must ever wonder why an individual is moved to
pray.

The Pueblos in their institution of the priest, and the rest
of aboriginal America in its institution of the shaman, select
and reward two opposing types of personality. The Plains
Indians in all their institutions gave scope to the self-reliant
man who could easily assume authority. He was rewarded
beyond all others. The innovations the returned Crow Indian
brought back from his vision might be infinitesimal. That is
not the point. Every Buddhist monk and every mediaeval Chris-
tian mystic saw an his vision what his brethren had seen before.
But they and the aboriginal Crow claimed power — or godliness —
on the authority of their private experience. The Indian went
back to his people m the strength of his vision, and the tribe
carried out as a sacred privilege the instructions he had received.
In healing, each man knew his own individual power, and asked
nothing of any other votary. This dogma was modified in
practice, for man perpetuates tradition even in those institutions
that attempt to flaunt it. But the dogmas of their religion
gave cultural warrant for an amazing degree of self-reliance and
personal authority.

This self-reliance and personal initiative on the plains were
expressed not only m shamanism but in their passionate enthu-
siasm for the guerrilla warfare that occupied them. Their war
parties were ordinarily less than a dozen strong, and the individual
acted alone in their simple engagements in a way that stands at
the other pole from the rigid discipline and subordination of
modern warfare. Their war was a game in which each individual
amassed counts. These counts were for cutting loose a picketed
horse, or touching an enemy, or taking a scalp. The individual,
usually by personal dare-devilry, acquired as many as he could,
and used them for joining societies, giving feasts, qualifying as
a chief. Without initiative and the ability to act alone, an
Indian of the plains was not recognized in his society. The
testimony of early explorers, the rise of outstanding individuals in
their conflicts with the whites, the contrast with the Pueblos,
all go to show how their institutions fostered personality, almost
in the Nietzschean sense of the superman. They saw life as
the drama of the individual progressing upward through grades
of men’s societies, through acquisitions of supernatural power,
through feasts and victories. The initiative rested always with
him. His deeds of prowess were counted for him personally,

THE PUEBLOS OF NEW MEXICO

71

and it was his prerogative to boast of them on ritual occasions,
and to use them in every way to further his personal ambitions.

The ideal man of the Pueblos is another order of being.
Personal authority is perhaps the most vigorously disparaged
trait in Zuhi. '' A man who thirsts for power or knowledge,
who wishes to be as they scornfully phrase it ‘ a leader of his
people receives nothing but censure and will very likely be
persecuted for sorcery,” and he often has been. Native authority
of manner is a liability m Zuni, and witchcraft is the ready
charge against a person who possesses it. He is hung by the
thumbs until he confesses It is all Zuhi can do with a man
of strong personality. The ideal man m Zuhi is a person of
dignity and affability who has never tried to lead, and who
has never called forth comment from his neighbours. Any con-
flict, even though all right is on his side, is held against him.
Even in contests of skill like their foot-races, if a man wins habitu-
ally he is debarred from running. They are interested in a
game that a number can play with even chances, and an out-
standing runner spoils the game : they will have none of him.

A good man has, in Dr. BunzeFs words, a pleasing address,
a yielding disposition, and a generous heart ”. The highest
praise, describing an impeccable townsman, runs : He is a

nice polite man. No one ever hears anything from him. He
never gets into trouble. He's Badger clan and Muhekwe kiva,
and he always dances in the summer dances.” He should
talk lots ”, as they say — that is, he should always set people
at their ease — and he should without fail co-operate easily with
others either in the field or in ritual, never betraying a suspicion
of arrogance or a strong emotion.

He avoids office. He may have it thrust upon him, but
he does not seek it. When the kiva offices must be filled, the
hatchway of the kiva is fastened and all the men are imprisoned
until someone's excuses have been battered down. The folk-
tales always relate of good men their unwillingness to take office
— though they always take it. A man must avoid the appearance
of leadership. When the chosen person has been prevailed upon
and has been initiated in the office, he has not been given
authority in our sense. His post carries with it no sanction for
important action. The council of Zuni is made up of the
highest priests, and priests have no jurisdiction in cases of con-
flict or violence. They are holy men and must not have a
quarrel put before them. Only the war chiefs have some measure

PATTERNS OF CULTURE

72

of executive authority, not in war so much as in peace-time
policing powers. They make proclamation of a coming rabbit
hunt, or coming dances, they summon priests and co-operate
with the medicine societies. The crime that they traditionally
have to deal with is witchcraft. Another crime, that of betray-
ing to the uninitiated boys the secret of the kachinas, is punished
by the masked gods themselves, summoned by the head of the
kachina cult. There are no other crimes. Theft rarely occurs
and is a private matter. Adultery is no crime and the strain
that arises from such an act is easily taken care of under their
marriage arrangements. Homicide, in the one case that is
remembered, was settled quickly by payments between the two
families.

The priests of the high council, therefore, are not disturbed.
They administer the mam features of the ceremonial calendar.
The successful prosecution of their plans could be blocked at
every turn by an uncooperative minor priest. He would only
have to sulk, refusing, for instance, to set up his altar or to
furnish his kachina priest mask. The priestly council could
only wait and defer the ceremonial. But everyone co-operates,
and no show of authority is called for.

This same lack of personal exercise of authority is as char-
acteristic of domestic situations as it is of religious. The matri-
lineal and matrilocal household of course makes necessary a
different allocation of authority from that with which we are
familiar. But matrilineal societies do not usually dispense with
a male person of authority in the household even though the
father does not qualify. The mother’s brother as the male
head of the matrilineal household is arbiter and responsible
head. But Zuhi does not recognize any authority as vested in
the mother’s brother, and certainly not in the father. Neither
of them disciplines the children of his household. Babies are
much fondled by the menfolk. They carry them when they are
ailing and hold them in their laps in the evenings. But they do
not discipline them. The virtue of co-operation holds domestic
life true to form just as it holds religious life, and no situations
arise that need to be drastically handled. What would they
be ? Marriage is in other cultures the almost universal occasion
where some authority is exercised. But among the Pueblos it
is arranged with little formality. Marriage elsewhere in the
world involves property rights and economic exchange, and on
all such occasions the elders have prerogatives. But in Zuhi

THE PUEBLOS OF NEW MEXICO 73

marriage there are no stakes in which the elders are interested.
The slight emphasis upon possessions among the Pueblos makes
a casual affair not only of the elsewhere dilSicult situation of
marriage but of a dozen others, all those which according to other
cultural forms involve investment of group property for the
young man. Zuhi simply eliminates the occasions.

Every arrangement militates against the possibility of the
child’s suffering from an (Edipus complex. Malinowski has
pointed out for the Trobriands that the structure of society
gives to the uncle authority that is associated in our culture with
the father. In Zuhi, not even the uncles exercise authority.
Occasions are not tolerated which would demand its exercise.
The child grows up without either the resentments or the com-
pensatory day-dreams of ambition that have their roots m this
familiar situation. When the child himself becomes an adult,
he has not the motivations that lead him to imagine situations
in which authority will be relevant.

Therefore the initiation of boys is the strange event that
it is m Zuhi, strange, that is, in comparison with the practices
that are constantly met with in the world. For the initiation
of boys is very often an uninhibited exercise of their prerogatives
by those in authority ; it is a hazing by those in power of those
whom they must now admit to tribal status. These rites occur
in much the same forms in Africa, in South America, and in
Australia. In South Africa the boys are herded under men
with long sticks who use them freely on all occasions. They
must run the gauntlet with blows raining upon them, they must
expect constant blows from behind accompanied by jeers. They
must sleep naked without blankets in the coldest months of the
year, their heads, not their feet, turned towards the fire. They
may not smear the ground to keep away the white worms that
bite them at night. At the first signs of daybreak they must
go to the pool and stay submerged in the cold water till the
sun appears. They may not drink a drop of water for the
three months of the initiation camp, they are fed with disgusting
food. In compensation, unintelligible formulas are taught them
with a great show of importance, and esoteric words.

In American Indian tribes so much time is not usually given
to boys’ initiation, but the ideas are often the same. The
Apache, with whom the Zuni have many relations, say that
breaking a boy is like breaking a young colt. They force him
to make holes in the ice and bathe, run with water in his mouth,

PATTERNS OF CULTURE

74

humiliate him on his trial war parties, and generally bully him.
The Indians of Southern California bury him in hills of stinging
ants.

But m Zuhi the boy’s initiation is never in any way an ordeal.
It is thought to make the rite very valuable if the children cry
even under the mild strokes they receive. The child is accom-
panied at every step by his ceremonial father and takes his
strokes either clasped upon the old man’s back or kneeling
between his knees He is given security by his accompanying
sponsor, rather than pushed violently out of the nest, like the
South African boy. And the final initiation ends when the
boy himself takes the yucca whip and strikes the kachina as he
has himself been struck. The initiation does not unload upon
the children the adults’ pitiful will to power. It is an exorcizing
and purifying rite. It makes the children valuable by giving
them group status. The whipping is an act which they have
seen their elders court all their lives as a blessing and a cure.
It is their accolade in the supernatural world.

The lack of opportunities for the exercise of authority, both
in religious and in domestic situations, is knit up with another
fundamental trait : the insistence upon sinking the individual
in the group. In Zuni, responsibility and power are always
distributed and the group is made the functioning unit. The
accepted way to approach the supernatural is in group ritual.
The accepted way to secure family subsistence is by household
partnership. Neither m religion nor in economics is the in-
dividual autonomous. In religion a man who is anxious about
his harvest does not offer prayer for the rain that will save it ;
he dances in the summer rain dances. A man does not pray
for the recovery of his son who is ill ; he brings the doctors’
order of Big Fire Society to cure him. Those individual prayers
that are allowed, at the personal planting of prayer-sticks, at
the head-washings of ceremonial cleanliness, at the calling of
the medicine men or a ceremonial father, have validity only
because they are necessary parts of a larger whole, the group
ritual to which they belong. They could no more be separated
from it and still have power than one word could be taken from
the long magic formulas and retain by itself the efficacy of the
perfect prayer.

Sanction for all acts comes from the formal structure, not
from the individual. A chief priest, as we saw, can plant prayer-
sticks only as chief priest and at those times when he is known

THE PUEBLOS OF NEW MEXICO 75

to be officially functioning A medicine man doctors because
he IS a member of the cult of medicine men. Membership m
that cult does not merely strengthen powers of his own, as is
the case on the plains, but it is the sole source of his powers.
Even the killing of Navajos is judged m the same way. A
folk- tale tells a story of consummate treachery. A rich Navajo
and his wife came to trade in a Zuhi household, and the men
murdered him for his turquoise. “ But they had not the power
of the scalp ’’ ; that is, they did not join the war cult, which
would have made it right for them to have perpetrated the deed.
According to Zuhi thought there is institutional sanction even
for this act, and they condemn merely the deed that does not
avail itself of its institutional warrant.

The Zuhi people therefore devote themselves to the con-
stituted forms of their society. They sink individuality m them.
They do not think of office, and possession of priestly bundles,
as steps in the upward path of ambition. A man when he can
afford it gets himself a mask in order to increase the number
of things to live by ” in his household, and the number of
masks his kiva commands. He takes his due part in the calendric
rituals and at great expense builds a new house to entertain
the kachina pxiest impersonations at Shalako, but he does it
with a degree of anonymity and lack of personal reference that
is hard to duplicate in other cultures. Their whole orientation
of personal activity is unfamiliar to us.

Just as in religion the acts and motivations of the individual
are singularly without personal reference, so too in economic
life. The economic unit is, as we have seen, a very unstable
group of menfolk. The core of the household, the permanent
group, is a relationship group of women, but the women are
not the ones who function importantly in the great economic
enterprises such as agriculture or herding, or even work in
turquoise. And the men who are necessary in the fundamental
occupations are a shifting group loosely held together. The
husbands of the daughters of the household will return to their
maternal households upon a domestic storm and will henceforth
have no responsibility for feeding or housing their children whom
they leave behind. There are, besides, in the household the mis-
cellaneous male blood relatives of the female relationship group :
the unmarried, the widowed, the divorced, and those who
are awaiting the passing of temporary unpleasantness in their
wives’ households. Yet this miscellaneous group, whatever its

76 PATTERNS OF CULTURE

momentary composition, pools its work m filling the common
corn store-room, and this corn remains the collective property of
the women of the household. Even if some newly cultivated
fields belong as private property to any of these men, all the
men jointly farm them for the common store-room just as they
do ancestral fields.

The custom is the same m regard to houses. The men
build them, and jointly, and they belong to the women. A
man, leaving his wife in the autumn, may be leaving behind him
the house he has spent his year building and a full corn-room,
the result of his season’s farming. But there is no thought of
his having any individual claim upon either ; and he is not
thought of as defrauded. He pooled his work in his household’s,
and the results are a group supply , if he is no longer a member of
that group, that is his affair. Sheep are to-day a considerable
source of income, and are owned by men individually. But they
are co-operatively herded by groups of male kindred, and new
economic motivations are very slow in making their appearance.

Just as according to the Zuni ideal a man sinks his activities
in those of the group and claims no personal authority, so also
he is never violent. Their Apollonian commitment to the mean
in the Greek sense is never clearer than m their cultural handling
of the emotions. Whether it is anger or love or jealousy or
grief, moderation is the first virtue. The fundamental tabu upon
their holy men during their periods of office is against any sus-
picion of anger. Controversies, whether they are ceremonial
or economic or domestic, are carried out with an unparalleled
lack of vehemence.

Every day in Zuni there are fresh instances of their mildness.
One summer a family I knew well had given me a house to
live in, and because of some complicated circumstances another
family claimed the right to dispose of the dwelling. When
feeling was at its height, Quatsia, the owner of the house, and
her husband were with me in the living-room when a man
I did not know began cutting down the flowering weeds that
had not yet been hoed out of the yard. Keeping the yard free
of growth is a chief prerogative of a house-owner, and therefore
the^ man who claimed the right to dispose of the house was
taking this occasion to put his claim publicly upon record. He
did not enter the house or challenge Quatsia and Leo, who were
inside, but he hacked slowly at the weeds. Inside, Leo sat
immobile on his heels against the wall, peaceably chewing a

THE PUEBLOS OF NEW MEXICO

77

leaf. Quatsia, however, allowed herself to flush. “ It is an
insult,” she said to me. “ The man out there knows that Leo
IS serving as priest this year and he can’t be angry. He shames
us before the whole village by taking care of our yard.” The
interloper finally raked up his wilted weeds, looked proudly at
the neat yard, and went home. No words were ever spoken
between them. For Zuni it was an insult of sorts, and by his
morning’s work on the yard the rival claimant sufficiently
expressed his protest. He pressed the matter no further.

Marital jealousy is similarly soft-pedalled. They do not meet
adultery with violence. A usual response on the plains to the
wife’s adultery was to cut off" the fleshy part of her nose. This
was done even in the South-West by non-Pueblo tribes like
the Apache. But m Zuhi the unfaithfulness of the wife is no
excuse for violence. The husband does not regard it as a
violation of his rights. If she is unfaithful, it is normally a first
step in changing husbands, and their institutions make this
sufficiently easy so that it is a really tolerable procedure. They
do not contemplate violence.

Wives are often equally moderate when their husbands are
known to be unfaithful. As long as the situation is not un-
pleasant enough for relations to be broken off, it is ignored. The
season before one of Dr. Bunzel’s visits in Zuni one of the young
husbands of the household in which she lived had been carrying
on an extra-marital affair that became bruited about all over
the pueblo. The family ignored the matter completely. At
last the white trader, a guardian of morals, expostulated with
the wife. The couple had been married a dozen years and
had three children ; the wife belonged to an important family.
The trader set forth with great earnestness the need of making
a show of authority and putting an end to her husband’s out-
rageous conduct. “ So,” his wife said, “ I didn’t wash his clothes.
Then he knew that I knew that everybody knew, and he stopped
going with that girl.” It was effective, but not a word was
passed. There were no outbursts, no recriminations, not even
an open recognition of the cnsis.

Wives, however, are allowed another course of action which
is not sanctioned in the case of deserted husbands. A wife
may fall upon her rival and beat her up publicly. They call
each other names and give each other a black eye. It never
settles anything, and even in the rare cases when it occurs, it dies
down as quickly as it has flaied. It is the only recognized

78 PATTERNS OF CULTURE

fist-fight in Zuni. If on the other hand a woman remains
peacefully with her husband while he conducts amour after
amour, her family are angry and bring pressure to bear upon
her to separate from him. Everybody says she must love
him,” they say, and all her relatives are ashamed. She is
disobeying the rules that are laid down for her.

For the traditional course is that of divorce. If a man finds
his wife’s female relatives uncongenial, he is free to return to
his mother’s household. It provides a means of avoiding domestic
intimacy with individuals he dislikes, and he merely dissolves the
relationships which he has found difficult to handle amicably.

If the Pueblos provide institutions that effectively minimize
the appearance of a violent emotion like jealousy, they are
even more concerned to provide Apollonian techniques at death.
Nevertheless there is a difference. Jealousy, it is evident from
the practices of many different cultures, is one of the emotions
that can be most effectively fostered by cultural arrangements,
or it can be outlawed. But bereavement is not so easily escaped.
The death of a near relative is the closest thrust that existence
deals. It threatens the solidarity of the group, calls for drastic
readjustments, especially if the dead individual is an adult, and
often means loneliness and sorrow for the survivors.

The Pueblos are essentially realistic, and they do not deny
sorrow at death. They do not, like some of the cultures we shall
discuss, convert mourning for a near relative into an ambitious
display or a terror situation. They treat it as loss, and an
important loss. But they provide detailed techniques for getting
past it as quickly and with as little violence as possible. The
emphasis is upon making the mourner forget. They cut a lock
of hair from the deceased and make a smudge to purify those
who grieve too much. They scatter black cornmeal with the
left hand — associated with death— to make their road black ” ;
that is, to put darkness between themselves and their grief. In
Isleta, on the evening of the fourth day, before the relatives
separate after the death, the officiating priest makes a ground
altar on which they put the prayer-sticks for the dead, the dead
man’s bow and arrow, the hairbrush used to prepare the body
for burial, and articles of the dead man’s clothing. There are,
besides, the bowl of medicine water, and a basket of food to
which everyone has contributed. On the floor, from the house
door to the altar, the priests make a road of meal for the deceased
to come in by. They gather to feed the dead man for the last

THE PUEBLOS OF NEW MEXICO

79

time and send him away. One of the priests sprinkles everyone
from the medicine bowl, and then opens the house door. The
chief speaks to the dead man, bidding him to come and eat.
They hear the footsteps outside and his fumbling at the door.
He enters and eats. Then the chief sprinkles the road for him
to leave by, and the priests chase him out of the village
They take with them the prayer-sticks for the dead, the pieces
of his clothing and his personal possessions, the hairbrush and the
bowl of food. They take them outside the village and break
the hairbrush and the bowl, burying everything out of sight.
They return on a run, not looking behind them, and bolt the
door against the dead by scratching a cross upon it with a flint
knife to prevent his entrance. It is the formal breach with
the dead. The chief speaks to the people telling them that
they shall not remember any more. It is now four years he
is dead.” In ceremonial and in folklore they use often the
idea that the day has become the year or the year the day.
Time has elapsed to free them of grief. The people are dis-
missed, and the mourning is over.

Whatever the psychological bent of a people, however, death
is a stubbornly inescapable fact, and m Zuhi the Apollonian dis-
comfort at not being able to outlaw the upheaval of death on
the part of the nearest of km is very clearly expressed m their
institutions. They make as little of death as possible. Funeral
rites are the simplest and least dramatic of all the rites they
possess. None of the elaboration that goes into their calendric
ceremonials is to be found on this occasion. The corpse is
interred at once, and no priests officiate.

But a death that touches an individual closely is not so
easily disposed of even in Zuni. They conceptualize this per-
sistence of grief or discomfort by the belief that the surviving
spouse is in great danger. His dead wife may ‘‘ pull him back ” ;
that is, in her loneliness she may take him with her. It is exactly
the same for a wife whose husband has died. If the survivor
grieves he is the more liable to the danger. Therefore he is
treated with all the precautions with which the person who has
taken life is surrounded. He must isolate himself for four days
from ordinary life, neither speak nor be spoken to, take an
emetic for purification every morning, and go outside the village
to offer black cornmeal with his left hand. He swings it four
times around his head and casts it from him to take off the
bad happening ”, they say. On the fourth day he plants his

8o

PATTERNS OF CULTURE

prayer-sticks to the dead and prays her, m the one prayer in
Zuiii that is addressed to an individual, either human or super-
natural, to leave him at peace, not to drag him down with her,
and to grant him

All of yoar good fortune whatsoever,

Preserving us along a safe road.

The danger that is upon him is not considered over for a year.
During that time his dead wife will be jealous if he approaches
a woman. When the year is up he has intercourse with a
stranger and gives her a gift. With the gift goes the danger
that has haunted him. He is free again, and he takes another
wife. It IS the same with a wife whose husband has died.

On the western plains mourning behaviour was at the furthest
remove from such an anxiety display. It was a Dionysian
indulgence m uninhibited grief. All their behaviour stressed
rather than avoided the despair and upheaval that is involved
in death. The women gashed their heads and their legs, and cut
off their fingers. Long lines of women marched through the
camp after the death of an important person, their legs bare
and bleeding. The blood on their heads and the calves of their
legs they let cake and did not remove. As soon as the corpse
was taken out for burial, everything in the lodge was thrown on
the ground for anyone to possess himself of. The possessions
of the dead were not thought to be polluted, but all the property
of the household was given away because in its grief the family
could have no interest in things they owned and no use for
them. Even the lodge was pulled down and given to another.
Nothing was left to the widow but the blanket around her. The
dead man’s favourite horses were led to his grave and killed
there while all the people wailed.

Excessive individual mourning also was expected and under-
stood. After the interment a wife or a daughter might insist
upon staying at the grave, wailing and refusing to eat, taking
no notice^ of those who tried to urge her back to the camp.
A woman, especially, but sometimes a man, might go out wailing
alone in dangerous places and sometimes received visions that
gave supernatural power. In some tribes women often went to
the graves and wailed for years, and in later years still went on
pleasant afternoons to sit beside them without wailing.

The abandon of grief for children is especially characteristic.
The extremity of the parents’ grief could be expressed among
the Dakota by their coming naked into the camp, wailing. It

THE PUEBLOS OF NEW MEXICO 8 1

was the only occasion on which such a thing could happen.
An old writer says of his experience among another Plains
tribe, “ Should anyone offend the parent during this time [of
mourning] his death would most certainly follow, as the man,
being in profound sorrow, seeks something on which to wreak his
revenge, and he soon after goes to war, to kill or to be killed, either
being immaterial to him in that state.” They courted death
as the Pueblos pray to be delivered from the awful possibility of it.

These two attitudes at death are familiar types of contrasted
behaviour, and most individuals recognize the congeniality of
one or the other. The Pueblos have institutionalized the one,
and the Plains the other. This does not mean, of course, that
violent and uninhibited grief is called up in each member of a
bereaved family on the western plains, or that in the pueblos
after being told to forget he adjusts himself with only such
discomfort as finds expression in breaking a hairbrush. What
is true is that in one culture he finds the one emotion already
channelled for him, and in the other the other. Most human
beings take the channel that is ready made in their culture.
If they can take this channel, they are provided with adequate
means of expression. If they cannot, they have all the problems
of the aberrant everywhere.

There is another death situation that is much more fully
provided with ritual techniques in these cultures — the situation
of the man who has killed another. In Zuni a slayer is treated
just as a surviving spouse is treated, only his retreat is in the
ceremonial kiva, supervised by the priests, and the removal of
the discomfort that rests upon him is more elaborately accom-
plished. It consists in his initiation into the war society. His
retreat, which like the widower’s involves sitting without move-
ment, neither speaking nor being spoken to, taking emetics, and
abstainmg from food, is the retreat of his imtiation into the
society. Any initiate into any society observes analogous tabus,
and in Zuni the restrictions that fall upon a man who has taken
life are thought of as an initiatory retreat. His release from
restrictions is his entrance upon his new social responsibilities
as a member of the war society. The war chiefs function for
life, not only in war, but more especially as guards and emissaries
on ceremonial and public occasions. They are the arm of the
law wherever any formal arrangements must be made. They
have charge of the scalp-house where the scalps are kept, and
they are especially efficacious in bringing rain.

82

PATTERNS OF CULTURE

The scalp throughout the long and elaborate ceremonial of
the war dance is the symbol of the man who has been killed.
The purpose of the ceremony is both to signalize the initiation
of the new member of the war society and to convert the scalp
into one of the Zuhi rain-making supernaturals. It must be
honoured by the dance and must be adopted into the pueblo
by the usual adoption rites. These rites, at any adoption or
marriage, consist essentially of the washing of the newcomer’s
head by the elder women of the father’s family So also the scalp
is washed in clear water by the aunts of the slayer and adopted
into the tribe by the same procedures by which the initiate was
adopted at marriage into the family of his bride. The scalp-
dance prayers are very explicit. They describe the transforma-
tion of the valueless enemy into a sacred fetish of the people
and the joy with which the people acknowledge the new blessing.

For indeed the enemy

Even though on rubbish

He lived and grew to maturity,

By virtue of the corn priests’ ram prayers,

[He has become valuable ]

Indeed the enemy,

Though in his life

He was a person given to falsehood,

He has become one to foretell
How the world will be,

How the days will be. .

Even though he was without value,

Yet he was a water being,

He was a seed being ,

Desiring the enemy’s waters,

Desiring his seeds,

Desiring his wealth,

Eagerly you shall await his days.^

When with your clear water
You have bathed the enemy,®

When in the corn priests’ water-filled court
He has been set up,®

All the corn priest’s children

With the song sequences of the fathers

Will be dancing for him.

And whenever all his days are past,

Then a good day,

A beautJul day,

A day filled with great shouting,

With great laughter,

A good day,

With us, your children,

You will pass.

^ Of the scalp dance. ® Adoption rite of washing the scalp

® On the scalp-pole in the plaza

THE PUEBLOS OF NEW MEXICO 83

So the scalp becomes a supernatural thing to which to pray,
and the slayer a life member of the important war society.

In Dionysian cultures the whole situation is handled dif-
ferently. Very often they made of it a terrible danger crisis.
The slayer was in supernatural danger, arid as among the Pima
he was purified for twenty days, sitting m a small round pit
dug in the ground. He was fed by a ceremonial father at the
end of a six-foot pole, and released from his danger only upon
being thrown, bound hand and foot, into the river.

On the western plains, however, their violence did not
capitalize these supernatural contaminations The man who had
killed another was not a person who needed salvation, he was a
victor, and the most envied of all victors. All their Dionysian
excitement was achieved in the celebration of an uninhibited
triumph, a gloating over the enemy who had been worsted. It
was a completely joyous occasion. The returning war party fell
upon Its own home camp in a surprise mock attack at daybreak,
their faces blackened in triumph,

, . shooting off their guns and waving the poles on which were the
scalps that had been taken. The people were excited and welcomed
them with shouts and yells All was joy. The women sang songs of
victory . . In the front rank were those who had . . counted
coups. . . Some threw their arms around the successful warriors
Old men and women sang songs in which their names were mentioned
The relatives of those who rode m the first rank . testified to their
joy by making gifts to friends or to poor people The whole crowd
might go to where some brave man lived or to where his father lived,
and there dance in his honour. They were likely to prepare to dance
all night, and perhaps to keep up this dancing for two days and two
nights

Everyone joined in the scalp dance, but it was no religious
occasion. No medicine men officiated. In keeping with its
social character it was in charge of men- women, transvestists who
had adopted the female life and who were in this tribe recognized
as matchmakers and “ good company They called out the
dances and carried the scalps. Old men and women came out
as clowns, and some of them even dressed to represent the very
warriors whose scalps were the centre of the ceremony.

No one who has seen the two dances can doubt the way
in which they stand contrasted : the scalp dance of the Pueblos
with its formal sets alternating in balanced programme before
the elaborate ground altar set with the great war medicine
bundles, and the scalp dance of the Cheyenne, with its physical

PATTERNS OF CULTURE

84

vigour and its celebration of the pride of victory, its imitation
of the movements of hand-to-hand conflict, its zest in having
found oneself the better man. In the Pueblo dance all is sobriety
and group action, as befits an occasion upon which the cloud is
being lifted from the slayer by his induction into an important
and valuable society and the installation of the scalp of an
unremarkable enemy as one of the ram-making supernaturals.
In the dance on the plains, even though the dancers come out
in groups, each of them is nevertheless a solo dancer, following
his own inspiration in expressing through every movement of
his trained body the glory of physical encounter. It is all
individualism, all exultation and triumph.

The Apollonian attitude of the Pueblos towards death cannot
outlaw the death of relatives nor the killing of enemies ; it
can at its best only make them sources of blessing and provide
means of getting past them with the least violence. Homicide,
the taking of life within the group, occurs so seldom that there
are hardly even tales remembered of it, but if it occurs, it is
settled without ado by payment arranged between the kin groups.
The taking of one’s own life, however, is entirely outlawed.
Suicide is too violent an act, even in its most casual forms,
for the Pueblos to contemplate. They have no idea what it
could be. Pressed to match stories, the Zufii tell of a man who
had been heard to say that he would like to die with a beautiful
woman. One day he was called to cure a sick woman, and
his medicine involved the chewing of one of their wild medicinal
plants. In the morning he was found dead. It is as close
as they can come to the idea of the act, and it does not occur
to them that he could have taken his life. Their story is only
of a man whose death occurred in the form he had been heard
to wish for.

The situation that to us parallels our practice of suicide
occurs only in folk-tales. A deserted wife in the tales occasion-
ally asks the Apache to come in four days to destroy the pueblo
and hence her spouse and his paramour. She herself cleanses
herself ritually and puts on her best clothing. On the appointed
morning she goes out to meet the enemy and be the first to fall
before them. This, of course, falls within our category of
suicide, though they think only of the ritual revenge. “ Of
course we would not do that now,” they say ; she was mean.”
They do not get beyond the fact of her vengefulness. She was
destroying her fellow villagers’ possibilities of happiness, from

THE PUEBLOS OF NEW MEXICO

85

which she felt herself shut out. In particular she was spoiling
her husband’s new-found pleasure. The rest of the tale is not
really imagined in Zuni ; it is beyond their experience, like
the supernatural messenger she gets to carry her message to the
Apaches. The more particularly you illustrate the practice of
suicide to a Zuni audience, the more politely and smili ngly
incredulous they become. It is very strange, the things that
white people do. But this is most laughable of all.

The Plains Indians, on the other hand, did far more with
the idea of suicide than we do. In many of the tabes a man
who saw nothing ahead that looked more attractive to him could
take a year’s suicide pledge. He assumed a pecuhar badge, a
buckskin stole some eight feet long. At the end where it dragged
behind upon the ground it had a long slit, and the pledger as
he took his pledged place in the forefront of their guerrilla
warfare was staked to his posibon through the slit in his insignia.
He could not retreat. He could advance, for the staking did not,
of course, hamper his movement. But if his companions fell
back, he must stay in his foremost position. If he died, he
at least died in the midst of the engagements in which he delighted.
If he survived the year, he had won by his courting of death all
the kinds of recognition that the Plains held dear. To the
end of his Life, when great men publicly recounted their exploits
in the constant, recognized boasting contests, he could name
his exploits and the year of his pledge. He could use the counts
he acquired in joining societies and in becoming a chief. Even
a person who did not despair of his hfe at aU might be so tempted
by the honours that were attainable in this fashion that he
would take the pledge. Or a society might try to pledge an
unwilling member. The warrior’s pledge was by no means the
only way in which suicide was recognized on the plains. It was
not a common act among them as it is in some primitive regions,
but tales of suicide for love often recur. They could well under-
stand the violent gesture of flinging away one’s life.

There is still another way m which the Apollonian ideal
expresses itself in Pueblo institutions. They do not culturally
elaborate themes of terror and danger. They have none of
the Dionysian will to create situations of contamination and
fear. Such indulgences are very common in mourning all over
the world — burial is an orgy of terror, not of grief. In Australian
tribes the nearest of kin fall upon the skull and poimd it to
bits that it may not trouble them. They break the bones of

86

PATTERNS OF CULTURE

the legs that the ghost may not pursue them. In Isleta, how-
ever, they break the hairbrush, not the bones of the corpse.
The Navajo, the people closest to the Pueblos, burn the lodge
and everything in it at death. Nothing the dead man has owned
can pass casually to another. It is contaminated. Among the
Pueblos only his bow and arrow and his mili, the medicine
man’s fetish of a perfect corn ear, are buried with the dead,
and the mill is denuded first of all its valuable macaw feathers.
They throw away nothing at all. The Pueblos in all their
death institutions are symbolizing the ending of this man’s life,
not the precautions against the contamination of his corpse, or
against the envy and vindictiveness of his ghost.

Ail the life crises are treated in some civilizations as terror
situations. Birth, the onset of puberty, marriage, and death
are constantly recurring occasions for this behaviour. Just as
in mourning the Pueblos do not capitalize terror m death, so
they do not upon the other occasions. Their handling of men-
struation is especially striking because all about them are tribes
who have at every encampment small houses for the men-
struating woman. Usually she must cook for herself, use her
own set of dishes, isolate herself completely. Even in domestic
life her contact is defiling, and if she should touch the implements
of the hunter their usefulness would be destroyed. The Pueblos
not only have no menstrual huts, but they do not surround
women with precautions at this time. The catamenial periods
make no difference in a woman’s life.

The great fear situation of surrounding tribes is their institu-
tion of sorcery. Sorcery is a label that is usually kept to describe
African and Melanesian practices, but the fear, the suspicion,
the hardly controlled antagonism to the medicine man in North
America that extends from Alaska through the Shoshonean
people of the Great Basin to the Pima of the South-West and is
widely associated with the Midewiwin Society to the east, is
thoroughly characteristic of sorcery. Any Dionysian society
values supernatural power not only because it is powerful, but
because it is dangerous. The common drive for capitalizing
dangerous expenences had free passage in the tribal attitude
towards the medicine man. He had power to harm more par-
ticularly than he had power to help. Their attitude towards him
was compounded of fear, of hatred, and of suspicion. His death
could not be avenged, and if he failed in his cures and suspicion
came to rest upon him, he was commonly killed by the people.

the pueblos of new MEXICO 87

The Mojave, a non-Pueblo tribe of the South-West, carried
this attitude to great lengths. It is the nature of doctors to
kill people in this way just as it is in the nature of hawks to
kill little birds for a living,’^ they say. All those whom a
medicine man killed were in his power in the after life. They
constituted his band. Of course it was to his interest to have
a large, rich company. A medicine man would say quite
openly, ‘‘ I don’t want to die yet. I haven’t got a large enough
band ready.” With a little more time he would have command
of a company he could be proud of. He would hand a stick
to a man as a token and say, ‘‘ Don’t you know I killed your
father ^ ” Or he would come and tell a sick person, It is
I who am killing you.” He did not mean that he was using
poison or that he had killed the young man’s father with a
knife. It was supernatural killing, a blame- and terror-situation
open and declared.

Such a state of affairs is impossible to imagine in Zuhi.
Their priests are not the object of veiled hatred and suspicion.
They do not embody in themselves the characteristic Dionysian
double aspects of supernatural power, so that they must be at
once death-bringers and saviours from disease. Even ideas of
witchcraft that are omnipresent in the pueblos to-day, for all
that they are full of European detail, do not constitute a genuine
situation of sorcery. Witchcraft in Zuhi is not an exercise of a
daring man’s will to supernatural power. I doubt whether any-
one has any specific witch techniques which he makes a practice
of using. All their descriptions of witch behaviour are folk-
loristic, like the owl’s eyes the witch substitutes in his head
after laying his own on a niche in the wall. They are not
the gruesome details of actually practised malice that are char-
acteristic of other areas. Witchcraft among the Pueblos, like
so many of their situations, is an anxiety complex. They vaguely
suspect one another ; and if a man is sufficiently disliked, witch-
craft is sure to be attributed to him. There is no concern with
witchcraft allegations at an ordinary death. It is only in time
of epidemic that they pursue witches, when the general anxiety
takes this form of expressing itself. They do not make a situation
of overshadowing terror out of the power of their holy men.

In the pueblos, therefore, there is no courting of excess in
any form, no tolerance of violence, no indulgence in the exercise
of authority, or delight in any situation in which the individual
stands alone. There are none of the situations that the Dionysian

88

PATTERNS OF CULTURE

counts most valuable. Nevertheless they have a religion of
fertility, and by definition we regard fertility cults as Dionysian.
Dionysus was the god of fertility, and in most of the world we
have no reason to separate the two traits ; the pursuit of excess
and the cult of procreative power have merged over and over
again in the most distant parts of the globe. The way in which
the Apollonian Pueblos pursue this same cult of fertility, therefore,
makes doubly vivid the basic tenets of their life.

The vast majority of their fertility ceremonies are without
any use of sex symbolism. Ram is induced by the monotonous
repetitiveness of the dance that forces the clouds up the sky.
Productiveness of the cornfield is ensured by burying in it objects
which have been made powerful by having been placed on the
altars or used by supernatural impersonations. Sex symbolism
IS much more in evidence in the near-by pueblo of Hopi than
It IS in Zuni. In Hopi there is very common ceremonial use
of small black cylinders associated with small reed circlets or
wheels. The cylinders are a male symbol and the circlets female.
They are tied together and thrown into the sacred spring.

In the Flute Society ceremony, a boy comes in with two
girls to bring rain, and they are given in anticipation, the boy
a cylinder, and the girls each a reed circlet. On the last day
of the ceremony these children, attended by certain priests, carry
these objects to the sacred spring and smear them with the
fertile mud scooped from the spring floor. Then the procession
starts back towards the pueblo. Four ground paintings such
as are used for altars have been made along the return route,
and the children advance, leading the rest, and throwing, the
boy his cylinder, the girls their circlets, upon each ground
painting in turn. Finally they are deposited in the dance shrine
in the plaza. It is a decorous and sober performance, formal
and unemotional to the last degree.

This kind of ceremonial sex symbolism is constantly used
in Hopi. In the dances of the women’s societies — Zuni, on the
other hand, has no women’s societies — ^it is especially popular.
In one of these ceremonies, while the girls, with cornstalks in
their hands, are dancing in a circle, four maidens come out
dressed as men. Two of them represent archers and two represent
lancers. The archers have each a bundle of vines and a bow
and arrow and they advance shooting their arrows into the
vine bundles. The lancers have each a long stick and a circlet
and throw the lance into the rolling hoop. When they reach

THE PUEBLOS OF NEW MEXICO 89

the dance circle they throw their sticks and hoops over the
dancers into the circle. Later they throw little balls of dampened
cornmeal out from the centre of the dancing girls to the spec-
tators, who scramble to possess themselves of them. The sym-
bolism is sexual, and the object is fertility, but the behaviour
is at the opposite pole from the cult of Dionysus.

In Zufii this kind of symbolism has not flourished. They
have ceremonial races which, as everywhere in the pueblos,
are run for fertility. One of them is between men and women,
the men at one end of the line with their kick-sticks, the women
at the other with their hoops, which they kick with their toes
as the men their sticks. Sometimes women run these races with
the masked clowns. In any case the women must win or the
race would be to no purpose. In Peru when similar races were
run for the same purpose every man ran naked and violated
every woman he overtook. The same petition is symbolized
in Zufii and in Peru, but Zuni’s is an Apollonian refashioning
of the Dionysian symbolism of Peru.

Nevertheless the association of licence with fertility cere-
monial IS not entirely lacking even in Zuni. On two occasions,
at the ceremonial rabbit hunt and at the scalp dance, laxness
is countenanced to the extent that it is said that children con-
ceived on these nights are exceptionally vigorous. There is a
relaxation of the usual strict chaperonage of girls, a boys
will be boys ’’ attitude. There is no promiscuity and no hint
of anything orgiastic. In addition the medicine-bundle cult that
has control of snow and cold weather is said to have formerly
held certain observances when for one night the priestesses of
the bundle received lovers and collected a thumb’s length of
turquoise from their partners to add to the decorations of the
bundle. The practice is no longer observed, and it is impossible
to tell to what degree licence was recognized.

Sex is not well understood in the pueblos. Little realistic
attention, in Zuhi at least, is direoted towards it, and there
is a tendency, familiar enough to us in our own cultural back-
ground, to explain sex symbolism by some inappropriate sub-
stitution. The wheels and the cylinders which the Hopi use
in constant and specific sex symbolism, they will tell you, repre-
sent the small clay rolls that the rain forms in the washes. The
shooting of husk bundles with arrows they say represents the
lightning striking the cornfield. Even more extreme substitutions
are to be found in the explanations of the most honest informants.

PATTERNS OF CULTURE

90

It IS an unconscious defence which they carry to the point of
absurdity.

A similar defence seems to have obliterated all traces of the
cosmological tales of the origin of the universe in the sex act.
Even so late as fifty years ago, Cushing recorded in Zuhi a
reference to this tale which is the fundamental cosmology of
the non-Pueblo Yuman tribes of the South-West and is known
in many neighbouring regions. The sun cohabited with the
earth, and out of her womb life came — the inanimate objects
men use, as well as men and animals. In Zuhi since Cushing’s
time origin myths have been recorded from different societies,
different priesthoods, and from laymen, and life is still said
to begin in the fourth underground world, but they do not
recognize it as earth’s womb in which life has been stirred by the
sky father. Their imaginations do not turn in that direction.

The attitude towards sex in Zuhi parallels certain standards
we know in our civilization as Puritanical, but the contrasts
are quite as striking as the parallels. The Puritan attitude
towards sex flows from its identification as sin, and the Zuhi
have no sense of sin. Sin is unfamiliar to them, not only in
sex but in any experience. They do not suffer from guilt com-
plexes, and they do not consider sex as a series of temptations
to be resisted with painful efforts of the will. Chastity as a way
of life is regarded with great disfavour, and no one in their folk-
tales IS criticized more harshly than the proud girls who resist
marriage in their youth. They stay m and work, ignoring the
occasions when they should legitimately be admired by the
young men. But the gods do not take the steps they were
supposed to take in Puritan ethics. They come down and con-
trive in spite of obstacles to sleep with them, and teach them
delight and humility. By these amiable disciplinary means ”
they bring it about that the girl shall embrace in mariiage
the proper happiness of mortals.

Pleasant relations between the sexes are merely one aspect
of pleasant relations with human beings. Where we make a
fundamental distinction, their phrase of commendation is,
“ Everybody likes him. He is always having affairs with
women,” Or, Nobody likes him. He never has trouble over
women.” Sex is an incident in the happy life.

Their cosmological ideas are another form m which they have
given expression to their extraordinarily consistent spirit. The
same lack of intensity, of conflict, and of danger which they have

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91

institutionalized in this world, they project also upon the other
world. The supernaturals, as Dr. Bunzel says, ‘‘ have no animus
against man. Inasmuch as they may withhold their gifts, their
assistance must be secured by offerings, prayers and magical
practices But it is no placation of evil forces. The idea is
foreign to them. They reckon, rather, that the supernaturals
like what men like, and if men like dancing so will the super-
naturals. Therefore they bring the supernaturals back to dance
in Zum by donning their masks, they take out the medicine
bundles and dance ” them. It gives them pleasure. Even
the corn in the storeroom must be danced. “ During the winter
solstice, when all ritual groups are holding their ceremonies, the
heads of households take six perfect ears of corn and hold them
in a basket while they sing to them. This is called ‘ dancing
the corn ' and is performed that the corn may not feel neglected
during the ceremonial season.’’ So too the great Dance of the
Corn, now no longer performed, culminated in this enjoyment
they had the means of sharing with the corn ears.

They do not picture the universe, as we do, as a conflict
of good and evil. They are not dualistic. The European notion
of witchcraft, m becoming domesticated in the pueblos, has had
to undergo strange transformation. It derives among them from
no Satanic majesty pitted against a good God. They have
fitted It into their own scheme, and witch power is suspect
not because it is given by the devil, but because it “ rides ”
Its possessors, and once assumed, cannot be laid aside. Any
other supernatural power is assumed for the occasion calling
it forth. One indicates by planting prayer-sticks and observing
the tabus that one is handling sacred things. When the occasion
IS over, one goes to one’s father’s sisters to have one’s head
washed .and is again upon a secular footing. Or a priest returns
his power to another priest that it may rest until it is called for
again. The idea and techniques of removing sacredness are as
familiar to them as those of removing a curse were in mediaeval
times. In Pueblo witchcraft no such techniques of freeing one-
self of supernatural power are provided. One cannot be quit
of the uncanny thing, and for that reason witchcraft is bad
and threatening.

It is difficult for us to lay aside our picture of the universe
as a struggle between good and evil and see it as the Pueblos
see it. They do not see the seasons, nor man’s life, as a race
run by life and death. Life is always present, death is always

PATTERNS OF CULTURE

92

present. Death is no denial of life. The seasons unroll them-
selves before us, and man's life also. Their attitude involves
no resignation, no subordination of desire to a stronger force,
but the sense of man's oneness with the universe When they
pray they say to their gods,

We shall be one person

They exchange intimate relationship terms with them .

Holding your country.

Holding your people,

You will sit down quietly for us
As children to one another
We shall always remain
My child,^

My mother,^

According to my words
Even so may it be

They speak of exchanging breath with their gods :

Far off on all sides

I have as my fatheis life-givmg priests ®

Asking for their life-givmg breath,

Their breath of old age,

Their breath of waters.

Their breath of seeds,

Their breath of iiches,

Their breath of fecundity,

Their breath of strong spint,

Their breath of power.

Their breath of all good fortune
with which they are possessed,

Askmg for their breath,

Into our ® warm bodies taking their breath,

We shall add to your ^ breath.

Do not despise the breath of your fathers.

But draw it into your body . .

That we may finish our roads together.

May my father bless you with life ;

May your road be fulfilled

The breath of the gods is their breath, and by their common
sharing all things are accomplished.

Like their version of man's relation to other men, their
version of man's relation to the cosmos gives no place to heroism
and man's will to overcome obstacles. It has no sainthood for
those who,

Fighting, fighting, fighting,

Die driven against the wall

^ Gods are here addressed as the children of mortals no less than their parents.
® Supernatural beings , gods. ® The medicme man’s.

^ The patient’s.

THE PUEBLOS OF NEW MEXICO 93

It has its own virtues, and they are singularly consistent. The
ones that are out of place they have outlawed from their universe.
They have made, in one small but long-established cultural
island in North America, a civilization whose forms are dictated
by the typical choices of the Apollonian, all of whose delight
is m formality and whose way of life is the way of measure
and of sobriety.

Chapter V

DOBU

Dobu Island lies in the d’Entrecasteaux group off the
southern shore of eastern New Guinea. The Dobuans are one of
the most southerly of the peoples of north-western Melanesia, a
region best known through the many publications of Dr Bronislaw
Malinowski on the Trobnand Islands. The two groups of islands
be so near that the people of Dobu sail to the Trobriands on
trading expeditions. But they are people of another environ-
ment and another temperament. The Trobriands are fertile
low-lying islands which provide an easy and bountiful living.
The soil is rich and the quiet lagoons full of fish The Dobuan
islands, on the other hand, are rocky volcanic up-croppings
that harbour only scanty pockets of soil and allow little fishing.
Papulation presses hard upon the possible resources, even though
the tiny scattered villages in their most prosperous days numbered
only about twenty-five people and now are cut to half, while the
Trobriands’ dense population lives at ease in large closely set
communities. The Dobuans are known to all the white recruiters
as easy marks in the area. Risking hunger at home, they sign
up readily for indentured labour ; being used to coarse and
scanty fare, the rations they receive as work-boys do not cause
mutiny among them.

The reputation of the Dobuans in the neighbouring islands,
however, does not turn on the fact of their poverty. They are
noted rather for their dangerousness. They are said to be
magicians who have diabolic power and warriors who halt at
no treachery. A couple of generations ago, before white inter-
vention, they were cannibals, and that in an area where many
peoples eat no human flesh. They are the feared and distrusted
savages of the islands surrounding them.

The Dobuans amply deserve the character they are given
by their neighbours. They are lawless and treacherous. Every
man’s hand is against every other man. They lack the smoothly
working organization of the Trobriands, headed by honoured
high chiefs and maintaining peaceful and continual reciprocal
exchanges of goods and privileges. Dobu has no chiefs. It
certainly has no political organization. In a strict sense it has

94

DOBU

95

no legality. And this is not because the Dobuan lives in a
state of anarchy, Rousseau’s “ natural man ” as yet unhampered
by the social contract, but because the social forms which obtain
in Dobu put a premium upon ill-will and treachery and make
of them the recognized virtues of their society.

Nothing could be farther from the truth, however, than to
see in Dobu a state of anarchy. Dobuan social organization is
arranged in concentric circles, within each of which specified
traditional forms of hostility are allowed. No man takes the
law into his own hands except to carry out these culturally
allowed hostilities within the appropriate specified group. The
largest functioning Dobuan grouping is a named locality of
some four to twenty villages. It is the war unit and is on terms
of permanent international' hostility with every other similar
locality. Before the days of white control no man ventured
into an alien locality except to kill and to raid. One service,
however, the localities exact of each other. In cases of death
and serious illness, when it is necessary to find out by divination
the person who is responsible, a diviner is brought from an
enemy locality. Diviners within the locality are thus not called
upon to face the dangers attendant upon divining a culprit,
and a practitioner is called in to whom distance gives a certain
immunity.

Danger indeed is at its height within the locality itself. Those
who share the same shore, those who go through the same daily
routine together, are the ones who do one another supernatural
and actual harm. They play havoc with one’s harvest, they
bring confusion upon one’s economic exchanges, they cause
disease and death. Everyone possesses magic for these purposes
and uses it upon all occasions, as we shall see. The magic is
indispensable for dealings within one’s locality, but its force is
thought not to maintain itself outside one’s known and familiar
circle of villages. People with whom one associates daily are
the witches and sorcerers who threaten one’s affairs.

At the centre of this local group, however, is a group within
which a different behaviour is required. Throughout life one
may turn to it for backing. It is not the family, for it does
not include the father nor his brothers and sisters nor a man’s
own children. It is the firm undissolving group of the mother’s
line. Living, they own their gardens and their house-sites in a
common village. Dead, they are buried in a common plot on
ancestral land. Every village has at its core a graveyard over-

PATTERNS OF CULTURE

96

grown with the brilliant-leaved croton shrubs. In it he the
distaff line of one’s mother, male and female, the owners of the
village during their lives, buried now at its centre. Around it
are grouped the platform houses of the living owners, the matri-
lineal line. Within this group inheritance passes and co-opera-
tion exists. It is called the ‘‘ mother’s milk ”, the susu, and
consists of a female line of descent and the brothers of these
women in each generation. The children of these brothers are
not included ; they belong to their mother’s villages, groups
towards which there is usually a major enmity.

The susu lives, often with closely related susu, in its own
village, the privacy of which is strictly observed. There is no
casual coming and going in Dobu. A path leads around the
outskirts of each village, and those who are privileged to approach
so near, skirt the settlement by this path. As we shall see, after
their father’s death the children of the men of that village have
not even this privilege of approach. If the father is still living,
or if it is the village of their spouse, they may enter by invitation.
All others pass around by the by-path. They may not stop.
Not even religious ceremonies nor harvest feasts nor tribal
initiations call people together promiscuously, for Dobu does not
specialize in such occasions. In the centre of the village a
graveyard takes the place of the open communal dance plaza
of the Trobriands. Dobuans are too aware of the dangers of
strange places to go afield for social or religious obseiwances.
They are too aware of the dangers of jealous sorcery to tolerate
strangers in their stronghold.

Marriage, of course, must be with someone outside this
trusted circle. It remains within the locality, and therefore it
allies two villages between which enmity runs high. Marriage
brings with it no amelioration of hostility. From its beginning
the institutions that surround it make for conflict and hard
feeling between the two groups. Marriage is set in motion by
a hostile act of the mother-in-law. She blocks with her own
person the door of her house within which the youth is sleeping
with her daughter, and he is trapped for the public ceremony
of betrothal. Before this, since the time of puberty, the boy
has slept each night in the houses of unmarried girls. By custom
his own house is closed to him. He avoids entanglements for
several years by spreading his favours widely and leaving the
house well before daylight. When he is trapped at last, it is
usually because he has tired of his roaming and has setded upon

BOBU

97

a more conjtant companion. He ceases to be so careful about
early rising. Nevertheless he is never thought of as being ready
to undertake the indignities of marriage, and the event is forced
upon him by the old witch m the doorway, his future mother-m-
law. When the villagers, the maternal km of the girl, see the
old woman immobile in her doorway, they gather, and under
the stare of the public the two descend and sit on a mat upon
the ground. The villagers stare at them for half an hour and
gradually disperse, nothing more ; the couple are formally
betrothed.

From this time forward the young man has to reckon with
the village of his wife. Its first demand is upon his labour.
Immediately his mother-in-law gives him a digging-stick with
the command, Now work.” He must make a garden under
the surveillance of his parents-in-law. When they cook and
eat, he must continue work, since he cannot eat in their presence.
He is bound to a double task, for when he has finished work on
his father-in-law’s yams he has still to cultivate his own garden
on his own family land. His father-m-law gets ample satis-
faction of his will to power and hugely enjoys his power over
his son-in-law. For a year or more the situation continues.
The boy is not the only one who is caught in this affair, for
his relatives also are loaded with obligations. So heavy are the
burdens upon his brothers in providing the necessary garden
stuJff and the valuables for the marnage gift that nowadays
young men at their brother’s betrothal escape from the imposition
by signing up with the white recruiter for indentured labour.

When the marriage valuables have finally been accumulated
by the members of the groom’s susu, they carry them formally
to the village of the bride. The party is made up of the groom’s
brothers and sisters, his mother and her brothers and sisters.
His father is excluded, as are also the husbands and wives of
the party, and the children of all the men. They present the
gifts to the bride’s susu. There is, however, no friendly mingling
of the two parties. The bride’s party await them at the farther
end of their ancestral village. The visitors remain at the end
near their own village. They appear sedulously unaware of
each other’s existence. A wide space separates them. If they
must notice the other party, they glare with hostility.

Every move in the marriage play is managed with similar
dour formahty. The bride’s susu must go to the groom’s village
and formally sweep it throughout, meanwhile taking with them

PATTERNS OF CULTURE

98

a considerable gift of uncooked food* Next day the groom’s
kin return again with a reciprocal gift of yams* The marriage
ceremony itself consists in the groom’s receiving from his mother-
in-law in her village a mouthful of food of her cooking, and
the bride’s similarly receiving food from her mother-in-law in the
village of her husband. In a society where eating together
is one of the institutional intimacies the rite is thoroughly
appropriate*

For marriage sets up a new grouping within which intimacy
and common interests are respected* Dobu does not solve its
marital problems by ignonng marriage alliances in the fashion
of many tribes of Dutch New Guinea who have strong clans
like Dobu* In these tribes the maternal line lives together,
harvests together, and shares economic undertakings. The
women’s husbands visit them secretly at night or in the bush.
They are the visiting husbands ” and in no way disturb the
self-sufficiency of the matrilineal line.

Dobu, however, provides common house-room for the hus-
band and wife and jealously safeguards their privacy in their
own house. The pair also provide garden food for themselves
and their children in common. But in making these two require-
ments which seem so elementary to a person brought up m
Western civilization, Dobu must face most difficult problems.
All its strongest loyalties are to the susu. If an inviolably private
house and garden is provided for the married pair, on whose
home ground and under whose hostile eyes shall they lie — the
susu of the wife or the susu of the husband ? The problem is
solved logically enough, but in a way which is understandably
uncommon. From marriage until death the couple live m
alternate years in the village of the husband and the village
of the wife.

Each alternate year one spouse has the backing of his own
group and commands the situation. The alternate year the
same spouse is a tolerated alien who must efface himself before
the owners of his spouse’s village. Dobuan villages are divided
by this rift into two groups which stand always over against
each other : on the one hand those who are of the matnlmeal
lineage and are called Owners of the Village ; on the other
those who are married into it and those who are the children
of the men owners. The former group is always dominant and
can put at disadvantage those who are merely resident for the
year because of the exigencies of married life. The owners

DOBU

99

present a solid front ; the group of the outsiders has little
coherence. Dobuan dogma and practice both are against uniting
two villages by a number of marital alliances. The more widely
alliances are spread among the various villages, the more heartily
the arrangements are approved. Therefore the spouses who are
married-m have no bonds of common susu allegiance. There
is a totemic category also which overpasses the bonds of the
“ locality but it is an empty classification in Dobu without
functions or importance, and need not be considered, for it
does not eifiectively ally the uncoordinated individuals who have
married into the village.

By all the traditional means at its command Dobuan society
demands that during the year in the spouse’s village the spouse
who is on alien territory play a role of humiliation. All the
owners of the village may call him by his name. He may
never use the name of any one of them. There are several
reasons why personal names are not used in Dobu as in our
own civilization, but when personal names are used it signifies
that important liberties may be taken by the namer. It denotes
prestige in relation to the person named. Whenever the village
makes or receives gifts in betrothal, in the exchange of marriage
gifts which is renewed year after year, or at death, the spouse
who IS married-in and resident there for the year must absent
himself. He is a perpetual outsider.

These are, however, the least of the indignities of his position.
There is tension of a more important sort. The village in
which the couple are living at the moment is seldom satisfied
with the behaviour of the spouse who has married in. Because
of the marital exchanges between the two villages, which con-
tinue with much the same formalities from the wedding till
the death of one of the spouses, the marriage is an important
investment of the susu. The men of the mother’s line have
an economic right to play an active role m it. It is easy for the
spouse who is on home ground to turn to his susu, especially to
the mother’s brother, for support in the marital quarrels that
recur constantly in Dobu. The mother’s brother is usually only
too willing to lecture the outsider publicly or send him or her
packing from the village with obscene abuse.

Tension of an even more intimate kind is also present. Faith-
fulness is not expected between husband and wife, and no
Dobuan will admit that a man and woman are ever together
even for the shortest interval except for sexual purposes. The

lOO

PATTERNS OF CULTURE

outsider spouse of the year is quick to suspect unfaithfulness*
Usually he has grounds. In the suspicion-ridden atmosphere of
Dobu the safest liaison is with a village brother ’’ or a village
sister ’h During the year when one is in one’s own village
circumstances are propitious and supernatural dangers at a
minimum. Public opinion strongly disapproves of marriage
between such classificatory brothers ” and sisters It would
disrupt the village to have obligatory mantal exchanges between
two parts of the settlement. But adultery within this group is a
favourite pastime. It is celebrated constantly in mythology, and
its occurrence in every village is known to everyone from early
childhood. It is a matter of profoundest concern to the outraged
spouse. He (it is as likely to be she) bribes the children for
information, his own or any in the village. If it is the husband,
he breaks his wife’s cooking-pots. If it is the wife, she maltreats
her husband’s dog. He quarrels with her violently, and no
quarrel can go unheard in the close set, leaf-thatched houses
of Dobu. He throws himself out of the village in a fury. As
a last resort of impotent rage he attempts suicide by one of
several traditional methods, no one of which is surely fatal.
He is usually saved and by this means he enlists his wife’s susu ;
in fear of what his relatives might do if the outraged spouse
succeeded in his attempts at suicide, they are moved to a more
conciliatory behaviour. They may even refuse to take any
further steps in the matter, and the partners to the marriage
may remain sullenly and angrily together. The next year the
wife can retaliate similarly in her own village.

The Dobuan requirement that a husband and wife maintain
a common domicile is therefore by no means the simple matter
it seems to us in our civilization. The circumstances make of
it an institution of such difficulty that it continuously threatens
the marriage and commonly destroys it. Broken marriages
are excessively common, fully five times as frequent as, for
example, in Manus, another Oceanic culture which Dr. Fortune
has described. The second requirement exacted of Dobuan
partners in marriage is rendered equally difficult by the cultural
institutions : that they provide garden food in common for
themselves and their children. This requirement comes into
conflict with basic privileges and magical prerogatives.

The fierce exclusiveness of ownership m Dobu is nowhere
more violently expressed than in the beliefs about hereditary
proprietorship of yams. The line of yams descends within the

DOBU

lOI

susu as surely as the blood in the veins of its members. The
seed yams are not pooled even in the gardens of the married pair.
Each of them cultivates his own garden, planted with seed yams
of his hereditary line, and they are made to grow by magical
incantations owned individually and secretly in his susu line.
The universal dogma of their society is that only yams of one’s
own blood line will grow in one’s garden, brought to fruition
by the magical incantations that have descended with the seed.
The exception that custom allows in practice we shall describe
later. No exception is allowed in so far as the conjugal gardens
are concerned. Individually husband and wife save their seed
from the preceding crop, plant their hereditary yams, and are
responsible for the final yield. Food is never sufficient in Dobu,
and everyone goes hungry for the last few months before planting
if he is to have the requisite yams for seed. The greatest Dobuan
delinquency is the eating of one’s seed yams. The loss is never
made up. It would be impossible for the husband or wife to
make it good, for yams not of the matrilineal line would not
grow in one’s garden. Even one’s own susu does not make up
so flagrant a bankruptcy as a loss of seed. One who would fall
so low as to eat his yams for planting is a bad bet backed not
even by his own clan. He is for life the Dobuan beachcomber.

The garden of the wife and the garden of the husband,
therefore, are inevitably separate. The seed yams are separately
owned in perpetuity, and they are grown with magical incanta-
tions also separately handed down and not pooled The failure
of cither’s garden is deeply resented and becomes the basis of
marital quarrels and divorce. Nevertheless work in the gardens
is shared by the two ; their gardens are as inviolably private
to the husband and wife and the children as the house is ; and
the food supply from the gardens is pooled for their common use.

As soon as the marriage is dissolved by death, or whenever
the father dies even though the father and mother have separated
years before, all food from the father’s village, every bird or fish
or fruit, becomes strictly tabu to his children. Only during his
lifetime they eat it without hurt, a difficult concession in Dobu
to the fact that children are reared by their two parents. In
similar fashion, at the father’s death the children are forbidden
entry into his village. That is, as soon as the exigencies of
the marital alliance no longer have to be considered, the mother’s
village claims them to the exclusion of any contact with the
outlawed line. When as adults or old people they must carry

102

PATTERNS OF CULTURE

food to the village of their father in a ritual exchange, on the
outskirts they stand motionless with bowed head while others
take their burdens inio the village. They wait till the party
returns, and then head the procession back to their mother’s
village. The village of one’s father is called “ the place of
bowing one’s head Even more stringent is the tabu upon
approaching the village of one’s dead spouse. One must stop
short still farther off or find one’s way circuitously past it. The
concessions so insecurely granted to a marital alliance have been
rescinded with redoubled restrictions.

The jealousy, the suspicion, the fierce exclusiveness of owner-
ship that are characteristic of Dobu are all in the foreground
of Dobuan marriage, but it is impossible to give them full weight
until we have considered also their manner of life in other respects.
The motivations that run through all Dobuan existence are
singularly limited. They are remarkable because of the con-
sistency with which the institutions of the culture embody them
and the lengths to which they are carried. In themselves they
have the simplicity of mama. All existence is cut-throat com-
petition, and every advantage is gamed at the expense of a
defeated rival. This competition, however, is not like that we
shall describe upon the North-West Coast, where rivalry is in
the full glare of publicity and conflict is arrogant and above-
board. In Dobu It is secret and treacherous. The good
man, the successful man, is he who has cheated another of his
place. The culture provides extravagant techniques and elabor-
ate occasions for such behaviour. In the end all existence in
Dobu is brought under the domination of these purposes.

The violence of Dobuan regard for ownership and the degree
to which It involves the victimizing of others and their recipro-
cating suspicion and ill-will are grossly reflected m their religion.
The whole region of Oceania adjacent to Dobu is one of the
world’s strongholds of magical practices, and those students of
religion who define religion and magic as mutually exclusive
and opposed to one another would have to deny religion to
the Dobuans. Anthropologically speaking, however, magic and
religion are complementary ways of handling the supernatural,
religion depending upon setting up desirable personal relations
with that world, and magic using techniques which automatically
control it. In Dobu there is no propitiation of supernatural
beings, no gifts or sacrifices to cement co-operation between
gods and petitioners. The supernatural beings that are known

DOBXJ

103

in Dobu are a few secret magical names, the knowledge of which,
like the discovery of the name Rumpelstilchen ’’ in the folk-
tale, gives the power of command. Therefore the names of
supernaturals are unknown to large numbers of Dobuans. No
man knows any except those for which he has paid or which have
come to him by inheritance. The important names are never
spoken aloud, but mumbled under the breath to prevent anyone
else’s hearing. All the beliefs connected with them are related
to name-magic rather than to religious propitiation of the
supernatural.

Every activity has its relevant incantations, and one of the
most striking of all Dobuan beliefs is that no result in any field
of existence is possible without magic. We have seen how large
a part of Zufii life is passed over by their religion. There all
religious practices are said to be for rain, and even allowing for
the exaggeration of the traditional dogma, there are great areas
of existence that are not provided with religious techniques.
On the North-West Coast, as we shall see, religious practices
impinge very slightly upon the important activity of their lives,
the consolidating of status. It is otherwise in Dobu. For any
result of any kind one is dependent upon the magic one knows.
Yams cannot grow without their incantations, sex desire does not
arise without love-magic, exchanges of valuables in economic
transactions are magically brought about, no trees are protected
from theft unless malevolent charms have been placed upon
them, no wind blows unless it is magically called, no disease or
death occurs without the machinations of sorcery or witchcraft.

The magical incantations, therefore, are of incomparable
importance. The violence with which success is coveted is faith-
fully reflected in the fierce competition for magical formulae.
These are never owned in common. There are no secret societies
whose prerogative they are. There are no groups of brothers
to all of whom they descend. Even co-operation within the susu
never extends so far as to give its members joint benefit in the
powers of an incantation. The susu merely channels the strict
individual inheritance of magic. One has a claim upon the
formulae of one’s mother’s brother, but each incantation can
be taught to only one of the clan. It can never be taught to
two sons of the possessor’s sister, and the owner of the formula
makes his own choice among the possible heirs. Often he
chooses the eldest son, but if another son has been closer to
him or more helpful, he passes over the eldest son and the latter

104 PATTERNS OF CULTURE

has no redress. For life he may be without important formulas
such as those of the yams and the economic exchanges. It is a
handicap which it is an insult for anyone to mention, and one
which usually allows of no amelioration. Every man and woman,
however, possesses some charms. Disease-causing incantations
and love-magic are widely held. To-day work-boys away from
home may even sell a charm without reference to inheritance,
and the wages of four months of indentured labour is still passed
between them for a single incantation even though the principals
in the transaction have been servants of the white man and
to some degree alienated from native culture. The amount of
the payment is a slight indication of their value.

Dobuans of the small island of Tewara where Dr. Fortune
lived denied categorically that the whites or the native Polynesian
teachers of the missions on Dobu Island had been able to main-
tain gardens. It was impossible, they said, without magic.
They did not avail themselves of that universal primitive alibi,
that the native rules hold good only for the native. In Dobu
reliance upon magic, and upon magic only, is too strong to
allow the admission that whites or Polynesians are freed from
its necessity.

The bitterest conflict for the possession of magical incantations
IS between the sister’s sons, who rightfully claim the magic of
their mother’s brother, and the latter’s own sons, whose close
association with their father in the household and common
cause with him in gardening make a counter-claim strong enough
xo secure recognition in Dobuan practice. Dobuan dogma insists
always that only the yam-magic which descends in the clan
with the seed can grow that seed. Seed, as we have seen, is
never alienated from the clan. Nevertheless the garden incan-
tations are taught also to the owner’s sons. It is another sur-
reptitious concession to the strength of the group resulting
from marriage, and is, of course, a flagrant violation of Dobuan
dogma, which secures to each individual his exclusive right of
ownership.

The incantations are

like a doctor’s practice or a business place’s goodwill or a peer’s
title and lands. A doctor that alienated the one and the same prac-
tice by selling it or bequeathing it to two different people who are
not partners but business antagonists would hardly have his sale
legally supported The same is true of a business goodwill. A
sovereign who gave two men the same peerage and lands in feudal

DOBU

105

days would have had rebellion at his gates Yet in Dobu where
[the two heirs] are not partners or close friends or sharers in common
property but more apt to be antagonistic, the same practice is made
legal enough The one and the same goodwill is given to both

If the son, however, has obtained more of the father’s magic
at his death than the sister’s son, the latter, the rightful owner
according to Dobuan orthodox teaching, claims his rights from
the son and must be taught by him without fee. If the balance
lies in the other direction the son has no corresponding claims.

The magical incantations of Dobu must be word-perfect to
be effective, and there are often specific leaves or woods that
must be used with them with symbolic actions. They are most
of them examples of sympathetic magic and depend upon the
technique of mentioning bush-growing water plants to the new-
leafed yam that it may imitate their luxuriance, or describing
the hornbill’s rending of a tree stump to ensure the ravages of
gangosa. The incantations are remarkable for their male-
volence and for the degree to which they embody the Dobuan
belief that any man’s gain is another’s loss.

The ritual of the garden begins when the earth is prepared
for the planting of the seed yams and continues until the harvest-
ing. The planting charms describe the yams just planted as
of huge varieties and already grown. The charms required
during the early growth picture the twining of the vines under
the image of the web-spinmng of the large spider kapali :

Kapah, kapali,
twisting around,
he laughs with joy.

I with my garden darkened with foliage,

I with my leaves.

Kapali, kapali,
twisting around,
he laughs with joy.

During all this time no magical watch has been set upon
the yams, no magical thieving has been undertaken. But now
that they are somewhat grown it is necessary to root them
solidly in one’s own place. For yams are conceived as persons
and are believed to wander nightly from garden to garden. The
vines remain behind but the tubers are gone. Towards the
middle of the morning they normally return. For this reason
yams are not dug early in the morning when garden work is
usually done ; it would be in vain. Their return must be
compliantly awaited. Also when the yams are growing they

I06 PATTERNS OF CULTURE

resent too early curtailment of their freedom ; therefore the
husbanding incantations are not begun until the plants have
reached a certain stage of growth. These incantations lure the
roaming yams to remain in one’s own garden at the expense
of the garden in which they were planted. Gardening in Dobu
is as competitive as the struggle for an inheritance. A man
has no notion that another gardener can plant more yams than
he can or make more yams grow from his seed tubers. What-
ever harvest his neighbour has in excess of his own is thought
to have been magically thieved from his own or someone else’s
garden. Therefore physical guard is mounted by the man over
his own garden from this time until harvesting, he uses what-
ever charms he knows to attract his neighbour’s yams, and he
opposes the charms of his neighbours by counter-charms. These
counter-charms root the yam tuber firmly in the earth where
it was planted and safeguard it for the owner’s harvesting :

Where stands the kasiara palm ^ ^

In the belly of my garden
at the foot of my house platform
he stands.

He will stand inflexible, unbending,
he stands unmoved.

The smashers of wood smash,
the hurlers of stone hurl,
they remain unmoved.

The loud stampers of earth stamp,
they remain unmoved.

He remains, he remains
inflexible, unbending
The yam kulia,^

he remains inflexible, unbending.

He remains, he remains unmoved
in the belly of my garden

The privacy of the garden is respected to such a degree that
by custom man and wife have intercourse within it. A good
crop is a confession of theft. It is supposed to have been alien-
ated from the gardens even of one’s own susu by dangerous
sorcery. The amount of the harvest is carefully concealed and
reference to it is an insult. In all the surrounding islands of
Oceania harvest is the occasion for a great ritual display of
yams, an ostentatious parade that is a high point in the year’s
ceremonial. In Dobu it is as secret as theft. The man and

^ The hardest wood m the bush. It stands erect in a storm that bends all other
trees

variety of yam The whole stanza is repeated for all the varieties.

DOBU

107

his wife convey it little by little to the storehouse. If their
harvest is good they have reason to fear the spying of others,
for in case of disease or death the diviner commonly attributes
the calamity to a good harvest. Someone is thought to have
resented the successful crop so much that he put sorcery upon
the successful gardener.

The disease-charms have a malevolence all their own. Every
man and woman m the Tewara village owns from one to five.
Each is a specific for a particular disease, and the person who
owns the incantation owns also the incantation for remov-
ing the same affliction. Some persons have a monopoly of
certain diseases and hence are sole owners of the power to cause
It and the power to cure it. Whoever has elephantiasis or
scrofula in the locality, therefore, knows at whose door to lay
It. The charms make the owner powerful and are greatly
coveted.

The incantations give their possessors an opportunity for
the most explicit expression of malignity the culture allows.
Ordinarily such expression is tabu. The Dobuan does not risk
making a public challenge when he wishes to injure a person.
He is obsequious and redoubles the shows of friendship. He
believes that sorcery is made strong by intimacy, and he waits the
opportunity for treachery. But in placing his disease-charm
upon his enemy and in teaching his charm to his sister’s son
he has full licence for malevolence. It is an occasion out of
reach of his enemy’s eye or ear, and he lays aside his pretences.
He breathes the spell into the excreta of the victim or into a
creeper which he lays across the path of his enemy, biding near-by
to see that the victim actually brushes against it. In com-
municating the spell the sorcerer imitates in anticipation the
agony of the final stages of the disease he is inflicting. He
writhes upon the ground, he shrieks in convulsion. Only so,
after faithful reproduction of its effects, will the charm do its
destined work. The diviner is satisfied. When the victim has
brushed against the cieeper he takes the bit of vine home with
him and lets it wither in his hut. When he is ready for his
enemy’s death he burns it in his fire.

The charms themselves are almost as explicit as the action
that accompanies them. Each line is punctuated with a vicious
spitting of ginger upon the object which is to carry the charm.
The following is the incantation for causing gangosa, the horrible
disease which eats away the flesh as the hornbill, its animal

I08 PATTERNS OF CULTURE

patron from which the disease is named, eats the tree trunks
with its great rending beak :

Hornbill dweller of Sigasiga
in the lowana tree top,
he cuts, he cuts,
he rends open,
from the nose,
from the temples,
from the throat,
from the hip,

from the root of the tongue,

from the back of the neck,

from the navel,

from the small of the back,

from the kidneys,

from the entrails,

he rends open,

he rends standing

Hornbill dweller of Tokuku,

in the lowana tiee top,

he 1 crouches bent up,

he crouches holding his back,

he crouches arms twined in front of him,

he crouches hands over his kidneys,

he crouches head bent in arms twined about it,

he crouches double twined

Waiimg, shrieking,

it * flies hither,

quickly it flies hither

When a person finds himself the victim of a disease, he sends
to the person who has put the disease upon him. There is
no other way to ward off death. The disease can only be cured
or ameliorated by the corresponding exorcism owned by the
same sorcerer. Usually the sorcerer, if he is induced to exorcize
the disease, does not himself visit the sufferer. He breathes
the exorcism into a vessel of water brought him by a relative
of the sick man. It is sealed, and the sufferer is bathed with
the water in his own house. The exorcism is often thought to
stave off death and permit deformity — a reflection of the fact
that many of the common native diseases produce deformity
rather than death. For the introduced diseases, tuberculosis,
measles, influenza, and dysentery, though they have been known
and fatal in Dobu for fifty years, there are no incantations.

The Dobuans use these disease-charms freely and for char-
acteristic purposes. Their way of putting a simple property
mark on goods or trees is to contaminate them by magic with
their proprietary disease. The natives say, “ That is Alo^s tree,*’

^ The victim ^ The immaterial power of the charm.

DOBU

109

or “ That is Nada’s tiee/’ meaning, “ That is the tree Alo has
charmed with tertiary yaws,” or “ That is the tree upon which
Nada has placed paralysis.” Everyone knows, of course, the
possessors of these disease-charms, and whoever owns them uses
them as property marks. The only way in which one can
gather the fruit of one’s own trees is first to exorcize the disease.
Since the ownership of the exorcism is inseparable from the
ownership of the disease-causing charm, safety from the original
disease placed upon the tree can always be managed. The
difficulty is that the possibility of theft from the disease-charmed
tree must also be guarded against. A thief has placed a second
disease upon the tree. He has run the risk of not exorcizing the
original disease by his own disease incantation, which may not
be an exorcism specific to the disease with which the tree is
contaminated. He recites his hereditary exorcism, inserting also
mention of the disease he is concerned to remove from the tree,
afterward placing his own hereditary disease-causing charm upon
it. Therefore when the owner comes to harvest his tree it is
possible that another disease may be gathered with the fruit.
The exorcism he uses is always couched in the plural for safety’s
sake. The formula runs :

They fly away,

ihey go.

Suspicion, in Dobu, runs to paranoid lengths, and a counter-
charm is always suspected. Actually the fear of the imposed
disease is too great to allow such trifling except in the case of
famine, when theft may be risked as an alternative to starvation.
The fear with which the curse of disease laid upon property is
regarded is overwhelming. The incantation is reserved for out-
lying trees ; a curse upon trees of the village would kill the
whole village. Everyone would move away if the dried coconut
palm frond that signifies the imposition of the curse was found
tied around a village tree. When Dr. Fortune, before he had
been taught the gangosa charm, made as if to place it upon
goods he wished to leave unprotected in an unfamiliar village,
his house-boys bolted precipitously into the night. He found
later that families living fifty or a hundred yards away aban-
doned their houses and went to their homes in the hills.

The power to inflict disease does not stop with these um-
versally owned spells for specific diseases. Powerful sorcerers —
rather, powerful men, since all men are sorcerers — have a still

no

PATTERNS OF CULTURE

more extreme resource, vada. They can confront the victim
himself, and such is the terror of the sorcerer’s curse that he
falls writhing to the ground. He never regains his wits and
wastes away to a destined death. In order to inflict this curse a
man bides his time and when he is ready to act chews great
quantities of ginger to make his body hot enough to raise the
power of the charm to a proper pitch. He abstains from sexual
intercourse. He drinks great quantities of sea water to parch
his throat, that he may not swallow his own evil charms with
his saliva. Then he enlists a trusted relative as watchdog to
climb a tree near the garden where the unsuspecting victim is
at work alone. Together the two make themselves invisible by
magical incantation, and the watcher takes up his position in the
tree in order to be able to give the alarm if anyone approaches.
The sorcerer crawls unheard till he faces his victim. He lets
out the curdling shriek of the sorcerer, and the victim falls to
the ground. With his charmed lime spatula the sorcerer removes
the organs of his body, so they say, and closes the wound without
scar. Three times he tests the victim : “ Name me.” It is a
proof of his success that the man is beyond recognizing or naming
anyone. He only mumbles meaninglessly and runs raving down
the path. He never eats again. He is incontinent of urine,
and his bowels are affected. He loses strength and dies.

This account was given by a trustworthy and intimately
known native. Evidence of the native belief may be observed
in the cases of those who are stricken in lingering death after
the sorcerer’s confrontation. Vada stresses in extreme form the
malignity of Dobuan practices and the terror that makes possible
its ultimate effects.

So far we have avoided mention of Dobuan economic ex-
changes. The passion for endless reciprocal commercial trans-
actions that grips so much of Melanesia is present also in Dobu.
The passionately desired and passionately resented success which
lies closest to the heart of every Dobuan is sought primarily
in two fields, the field of material possessions and the field of
sex. Sorcery is another field, but in these connections it is an
instrument rather than an end, a means towards attaining and
defending success in the primary activities.

Material success in a community ridden with treachery and
suspicion like Dobu must necessarily offer many contrasts to
the economic goals that are recognized in our civilization.
Accumulation of goods is ruled out at the beginning. Even

DOBU

III

one successful harvest spied out by others and never admitted
by the gardener is occasion enough for the practice of fatal
sorcery. Ostentatious display is likewise debarred. The ideal
commercial technique would be a system of counters that pass
through each man’s hands but may not remain with him as a
permanent possession. It is precisely the system that obtains
in Dobu. The high point of life in these islands is an inter-
national exchange which includes a dozen islands that he in a
roughly drawn circle approximately one hundred and fifty miles
in diameter. These islands constitute the Kula ring which Dr.
Malinowski has described also for the Trobriands, the partners
of Dobu to the north.

The Kula ring extends farther than the Dobuan configuration
of culture, and other cultures which participate in it have cer-
tainly given Its procedures other motivations and satisfactions.
The peculiar customs of the Kula which Dobu has made so
coherent with the rest of its cultural pattern did not necessarily
originate in these patterns or in the motivations that are now
associated with them in Dobu. We shall discuss only the Dobuan
exchange. Except for the Trobriands, we do not know the Kula
customs of the other islands.

The Kula ring is a circle of islands around which one kind
of valuable travels in one direction and another in the other
in semi-annual exchange. The men of each island make long
voyages across the open seas, carrying shell necklaces in clock-
wise direction and armshells counter-clockwise. Each man has
his partner in the exchanging island to each direction and
bargains for advantage by every means in his control. Eventu-
ally the valuables make full circle, and new ones of course may
be added. The armshells and the necklaces are all named with
personal names, and certain ones possess a traditional excessive
value in proportion to their fame.

The matter is not so utterly fantastic as it sounds from the
formal pattern of the procedure. Great parts of Melanesia and
Papua are honeycombed with local specialization of industries.
In the Kula ring one people polishes greenstone, one makes
canoes, another makes pottery, another carves wood, and still
another mixes paints. Exchange of all these articles goes on
under cover of the ritual bargaining for the major valuables.
In a region where the passion for reciprocal exchanges has been
enormously cultivated, the system of ceremonial exchange institu-
tionalized in the Kula does not seem so extreme as it necessarily

1 12 PATTERNS OF CULTURE

does to observers from a culture which lacks the equivalent
substructure. Even the seemingly arbitrary direction in which
the armshells and the necklaces move has its basis in the exigencies
of the situation. The armshells are made of trocus shell, which
is found only in the northern region of the Kula ring, and the
necklaces are fashioned of spondylus shell, which is imported
from the south into the most southern islands of the group.
Therefore in the trading of the western islands of the ring, which
overbalance those to the east, the northern valuables go south
and the southern valuables go north. At the present time the
valuables are old and traditional and new importations of small
importance. But the pattern remains.

Every year during the lull m gardening operations after the
yams are planted and before they must be magically guarded
to keep them at home, the canoes of Dobu go on the Kula
expedition to the north and to the south. Every man has
Kula valuables from the south to promise in exchange for the
Kula valuables he is to receive from the north.

The peculiar character of Kula exchange depends upon the
fact that each island goes to receive the valuables in the island
of Its partners. The voyaging island takes gifts in solicitation and
receives the valuables, promising return of those in its possession
when the hosts return the visit. Therefore Kula exchange is
never a market transaction, each man spreading out his valuables
and arranging the acceptable exchange. Each man receives his
prize on the basis of the gift of solicitation and a promise, a
promise which is supposed to be of a valuable he has already
in his possession but has left at home ready to give at the appro-
priate moment.

The Kula is not a group exchange. Each man exchanges
individually, and with all the forms of courtship, with an in-
dividual partner. The charms for success in the Kula are love-
charms. They magically dispose the partner to favour the suit
of the petitioner. They make the petitioner irresistible in his
bodily beauty, smoothing his skin, clearing it of the scars of
ringworm, reddemng his mouth, and scenting him with per-
fumes and unguents. In the extravagant ideology of Dobu only
the equivalent of physical passion can make credible the spec-
tacle of a peaceful and advantageous exchange of valuables.

The men of each canoe-load gather together their solicitory
gifts of food and manufactured objects. Only the owner of the
canoe and his wife have used any magic incantations before the

DOBU

sailing. All other magic is reserved until the Kula is actually
under way. The owner of the canoe has risen at dawn to
charm the mat which is to cover the valuables on the return
voyage and to ensure magically its covering a great pile of
wealth. His wife also has an incantation she must use to exalt
the expedition of her husband, his coming like thunder over
the sea, his rousing a quivering eagerness not only in the body
of his partner but in that of his wife and of his children, their
dreams full of the great man, her husband. When all the
preparations are completed, however propitious the wind, a
ritual halt must be observed for the remainder of the day. It
should be observed on a desolate and uninhabited foreshore
away from all contamination by women, children, dogs, and
everyday involvements. But when the canoes go south there
is no such island available, and the ritual halt is observed on
the beach, every man going back to the village at night, remark-
ing, however contrary to fact, that the wind had been impossible.
It is a form of ritual suspicion that is never allowed to lapse.
Next morning the canoe owner packs the canoe, using his second
incantation, the last that has any communal application. Even
in this, as in his wife’s previous incantation, he names himself
pre-eminently. The food he is taking as gifts of solicitation
he converts magically into the Kula valuables themselves and
describes the partners to whom they are to go as waiting for
their arrival as for the new moon, watching from the edge of
their house platforms for them, for the canoe owner himself.

The Dobuans are bad sailors, hugging the reef and dis-
embarking every night. The seasons for the Kula trips are
the seasons of the long calms. They use wind-charms, calling
upon the desired north-west wind to take in wedlock their sail
of fine pandanus leaf, to clutch it, her misbehaving child, to
come quickly to prevent another’s stealing her husband from
her. They believe about wind, as they believe about all other
events of existence, that it arises from no other source than
magic.

When at last the canoes have arrived at the islands of their
destination, they select a barren coral reef and disembark for
the great Kula preparatory rites. Each man, by magic and
by personal decoration, makes himself as beautiful as possible.
The incantations are private property in true Dobuan fashion,
and each man uses his magic for his strictly personal benefit.
Those who know no incantation are under the greatest handi-

I 14 PATTERNS OF CULTURE

caps. They must make shift for themselves, using such sub-
stitutes as suggest themselves to them. As a matter of fact,
in spite of the inviolable secrecy in which the possession of these
charms is held, the men of each canoe-load not knowing who
among them possess the charms, in the cases that have been
observed the men who know them are those who handle the
largest Kula exchanges. Their self-confidence gives them a
sufficient advantage over their companions. Those who know
charms and those who do not alike take the physical pains that
prepare one for the Kula arrival ; they scent themselves with
the perfumed leaf that is used in courtship, they put on a fresh
pubic leaf, they paint their faces and their teeth, they anoint
their bodies with coconut oil. Only so are they ready to present
themselves to their partners.

Each man’s transactions are conducted as private business.
Sharp dealings are important and highly valued, and true to
the Dobuan dogma that it is the closely associated person who
is the dangerous threatener of your life, retaliation upon the
successful Kula trader is in the hands of his unsuccessful canoe
partner or at least in those of another man from his locality,
not a matter to be settled between the internationals themselves.
It is said of the Kula valuables, m Homeric refrain, “ many
men died because of them But the deaths were not brought
about by the anger of outraged partners in exchange, Dobuan
against Trobriander, or man of Tubetube against Dobuan. It
is always unsuccessful Dobuan against a successful man of his
own locality.

The most prolific source of bad feeling is the sharp practice
known as wabuwabu.

To wabuwabu is to get many spondylus shell necklaces from
different places to the south on the security of one armshell left at
home in the north ; or vice versa, many armshells from the north
on a security that cannot meet them, promising the one valuable
which one possesses to many different persons in return for their gifts
that are being solicited It is sharp practice, but it is not entirely
confidence tnckstenng

“ Suppose I, Kisian of Tewara, go to the Trobnands and secure
an armshell named Monitor Lizard I then go to Sanaroa and m
four different villages secure four different shell necklaces, promising
each man who gives me a shell necklace Monitor Lizard in later
return. I, Kisian, do not have to be very specific in my promise.
Later when four men appear m my home at Tewara each expecting
Monitor Lizard, only one will get it. The other three are not
defrauded permanently, however. They are furious, it is true, and

DOBU

II5

their exchange is blocked for the year Next year, when I, Kisian,
go again to [the Trobriands, I shall represent that I have four neck-
laces at home waiting for those who give me four armshells. I obtain
more armshells than I obtained previously and pay my debts a
year late

“ The three men who did not get Monitor Lizard are at a dis-
advantage m my place, Tewara Later when they return to their
homes they are too far off to be dangerous to me. They are likely
to use sorcery to attempt to kill their successful rival who got the
armshell Monitor Lizard. That is true enough. But that is their
own business I have become a great man by enlarging my exchanges
at the expense of blocking theirs for a year I cannot afford to
block their exchange for too long or my exchanges will never be
trusted by anyone again I am honest in the final issue.*'

To wabuwabu successfully is a great achievement, one of
the most envied in Dobu. The great mythical hero of the Kula
was an expert in it. Like all Dobuan practices it stresses one’s
own gains at the expense of another’s loss. It allows one to
reap personal advantage in a situation in which others are
victimized. The Kula is not the only undertaking in which a
man may risk wabuwabu. The term covers also the victimizing
of others in the marital exchanges. The series of payments
that are set up between two villages during betrothal involve
considerable property. A man who dares to run the risk may
enter into an engagement in order to reap the economic profits.
When the balance of the exchanges is heavily on his side, he
breaks off the betrothal. There is no redress. A person who
gets away with it proves thereby that his magic is stronger than
the magic of the village he has outraged, which will, of course,
attempt his life. He is an enviable person.

Wabuwabu in this latter instance differs from that in the
Kula because the exchange itself is within the locality. The
enmity that is inseparable from relations within this group sets
over against each other the two parties to the exchange instead
of setting by the ears the commercial associates travelling in the
same canoe, as in the Kula. Wabuwabu in the two cases has
in common the fact that it is an advantage taken of another
person of the locality.

The attitudes that we have discussed, those involved in
marriage, magic, gardening, and economic exchange, are all
expressed in the strongest terms in behaviour at the time of
death. Dobu, in Dr. Fortune’s words, ” cowers under a death
as under a whipping,” and looks about immediately for a victim.
True to Dobuan dogma, the victim is the person nearest to the

Il6 PATTERNS OF CULTURE

dead ; that is, the spouse. They believe that the person with
whom one shares the bed is the person to charge with one’s fatal
illness. The husband has used his disease-causing incantations,
and the wife has used witchcraft. For though women also may
know the disease-charms, a special form of power is always
attributed to them by men, and death and desolation are by a
common convention of speech universally laid at their doors.
The diviner, when he is called in to determine the murderer, is
not bound by this convention, and lays the death as often at the
door of a man as of a woman. The convention reflects sex
antagonism more faithfully probably than it reflects attempted
murder. At any rate, men attribute to women a special tech-
nique of villainy, one that strangely resembles the European
tradition of witches on their broomsticks. Dobuan witches leave
their bodies sleeping beside their husbands and fly through the
air to cause accident — a man’s fall from a tree or a canoe’s
drifting from its moorings are due to flying witches — or to abstract
the soul from an enemy, who will thereupon weaken and die.
Men are in terror of these machinations of their women, so
much so that, believing that Trobriand women do not practise
witchcraft, they put on in the Trobriands a self-confident manner
which they do not assume at home. In Dobm the wife is at least
as much feared by her husband as the husband by his wife.

In the event of either of the married couple falling seriously
ill, the two must move immediately to the village of the afflicted
person if they are living for the year in the village of the other
spouse. Death must occur there if possible, where the surviving
spouse is in the power of the susu of the bereaved. He is the
enemy within the camp, the witch or the sorcerer who has
caused the breach in the opposing ranks. The susu presents a
solid front around the body of its dead. Only they can touch
the corpse or perform any of the duties of burial. Only they
can give the mourning cries. It is most strictly prohibited for
the spouse to be within sight of any of these proceedings. The
dead is displayed upon the house platform and the body is
adorned with valuables if he was rich ; large yams are put
about it if he was a good gardener. The maternal kin raise
their voices in the traditional keening. That night or the next
day the children of the sister of the deceased carry the body
away for burial.

The house of the dead is left empty and abandoned. It
will not be used again. Under the raised floor of the house

DOBU

II7

an enclosure is walled in by plaited mats, and into it the owners
of the village marshal the surviving spouse. His body is blackened
with charcoal from the fires, and the black looped rope, the
badge of mourning, is hung around his neck. The first month
or two he spends seated on the ground in the dark enclosure.
Later he works in the gardens of his parents-in-law under their
surveillance as he did during the period of betrothal. He works
also the gardens of his dead wife and of her brothers and sisters.
He receives no recompense, and his own gardens must be worked
for him by his own brothers and sisters. He is not allowed
to smile, nor to take part in any exchange of food. When the
skull IS taken from the grave and the sister’s children of the
deceased dance with it, he must not look upon the dancers.
The skull is kept by the sister’s son and the spirit ceremonially
sent upon its way to the land of the dead.

His own kin not only have to work his gardens during the
time of his mourning. They have much heavier burdens. After
the burial they must bring payment for it to the village of the
dead. They present cooked yams to the sister’s sons who have
performed the actual services, and a large gift of uncooked yams,
which are displayed in the village of the dead and distributed
to the relatives of the deceased within the village, the members
of the susu receiving the large share.

A widow is similarly m subjection to the kin of her dead
husband. Her children have special duties laid upon them, for
throughout the year they must cook a mash of bananas and
taro and take it to the susu of the dead “ to pay for their father
Did he not hold us in his arms ? ” They are the outsiders
paying the close kin group of their father, to which they do not
belong, for one of their number who has done well by them.
They are discharging an obligation, and there is no repayment
for these services.

The mourner must be released from subjection by further
payments by his own clan to the clan of the deceased. They
bring the gift of uncooked yams as before and the kinsmen of
the dead cut his rope badge of mourning and wash the charcoal
from his body. There is dancing, and his relatives lead him
back again to his own village. The year of his penance is
ended. He never enters the village of his spouse again. If
it is a widower who is released from mourning, his children of
course remain behind in the village of their true kin, the village
their father may never re-enter. The song that is sung at the

120

PATTERNS OF CULTURE

‘‘ ' My father told me of it, it is budobudo. Plenty of it
grows by the sea. I wanted to try it out. We drew the sap
from it. I took a coconut, drank from it, squeezed the sap
into the remainder, and closed it up. Next day I gave it to
the child saying, '' I have drunk of it, you may drink.’’ She
fell ill at midday. In the night she died. She was my father’s
village sister’s daughter. My father poisoned her mother with
the budobudo. I poisoned the orphan later.’

“ ‘ What was the trouble ? ’

“ ‘ She bewitched my father. He felt weak. He killed her
and his body grew strong again.’ ”

The formula that corresponds to our thank-you upon receiving
a gift is, ‘‘ If you now poison me, how should I repay you ? ”
That is, they seize upon the occasion to remark by formula to
the giver that it is not to his advantage to use the universal
weapon against one who is under obligations to him.

Dobuan conventions exclude laughter and make dourness a
virtue. The root of laughter, they,” they say in scorn of a
less malevolent neighbouring people. One of the prime obliga-
tions in important observances like gardening and the Kula
is to refrain from pleasurable activities or expressions of happi-
ness. “ In the gardens we do not play, we do not sing, we do
not yodel, we do not relate legends. If in the garden we behave
so, the seed yams say, ‘ What charm is this ? Once it was a
good charm, but this, what is this ? ’ The seed yams mistake
our speech. They will not grow,” The same tabu is in force
during the Kula. One man crouching on the outskirts of a
village of the Amphletts where the people were dancing, indig-
nantly repudiated the suggestion that he might join : My

wife would say I had been happy.” It is a paramount tabu.

This dourness which is a valued virtue bears also upon the
lengths to which jealousy and suspicion are carried in Dobu.
As we have seen, trespassing in a neighbour’s house or garden
is forbidden. Each person is left in possession. Any meeting
between man or woman is regarded as illicit, and in fact a man
by convention takes advantage of any woman who does not
flee from him. It is taken for granted that the very fact of
her being alone is licence enough. Usually a woman takes an
escort, often a small child, and the chaperonage protects her
from accusation as well as from supernatural dangers. There-
fore a husband normally mounts guard at the entrance to the
garden in the seasons of women’s work, amusing himself talking

DOBU

I2I

to a child, perhaps, and seeing that his wife speaks to no one.
He keeps track of the length of time she absents herself in the
bush for the natural functions and may even, in extreme cases,
accompany her there in spite of the terrible prudery of Dobu.
It is significant that prudery should be as extreme in Dobu as it
was among our Puritan ancestors. No man uncovers himself
before another. Even in a male crew travelling in a canoe,
a man goes over the side out of sight in the stern, even to urinate.
Any uncovering of one’s sex life is tabu also ; one may not
refer to it except when one indulges in obscene abuse. There-
fore a convention of speech refers to the prenuptial courtship
as chaste, though the dance songs that dramatize it are full of
explicit passion and the facts are a matter of the past experience
of every adult.

The deep-seated prudery of Dobu is familiar enough to us
in our own cultural background, and the dourness of Dobuan
character that is associated with it accompanied also the prudery
of the Puritans. But there are differences. We are accustomed
to associate this complex with a denial of passion and a lesser
emphasis upon sex. The association is not inevitable. In Dobu
dourness and prudery go along with prenuptial promiscuity and
with a high estimation of sex passion and techniques. Men and
women alike rate sex satisfaction high and make achievement
of it a matter of great concern. There is no convention of
indifference or absorption m a masculine world that supports a
man whose wife he suspects of betraying him The vicissitudes of
passion are exploited, whereas m Zuhi, for instance, they are
moderated by the tribal institutions. The stock sex teaching
with which women enter marriage is that the way to hold their
husbands is to keep them as exhausted as possible. There is
no belittling of the physical aspects of sex.

The Dobuan, therefore, is dour, prudish, and passionate,
consumed with jealousy and suspicion and resentment. Every
moment of prosperity he conceives himself to have wrung from
a malicious world by a conflict in which he has worsted his
opponent. The good man is the one who has many such con-
flicts to his credit, as anyone can see from the fact that he has
survived with a measure of prosperity. It is taken for granted
that he has thieved, killed children and his close associates by
sorcery, cheated whenever he dared. As we have seen, theft
and adultery are the object of the valued charms of the valued
men of the community. One of the most respected men on

124

PATTERNS OF CULTURE

resource which saves the face of the humiliated and is supposed
to rally the support of his own susu. Suicide, as we have seen,
IS usually attempted in marital quarrels and does actually rouse
the clan to support the resentful spouse who has attempted his
life. The institution of cutting down one’s fruit trees from
which fruit has been taken is less obvious. People who have
no disease-causing charms to place upon their trees name them
for a fatal accident or serious illness of a near relative, and the
person who steals from the tree is liable to this calamity. If
someone braves the curse, the owner descends upon his tree
and cuts it down. It is similar to behaviour at the taking of
life m attempted suicide, but it makes it clear that the appeal
in both cases is not to the pity and support even of one’s relatives.
Rather, in the extremity of humiliation, the Dobuan projects
upon himself and his possessions the maliciousness and the will
to destroy which are required in all his institutions. He is limited
to the same technique, though he uses it in these instances
against himself.

Life in Dobu fosters extreme forms of animosity and malig-
nancy which most societies have minimized by their institutions.
Dobuan institutions, on the other hand, exalt them to the highest
degree. The Dobuan lives out without repression man’s worst
nightmares of the ill-will of the universe, and according to his
view of life virtue consists in selecting a victim upon whom he
can vent the malignancy he attributes alike to human society
and to the powers of nature. All existence appears to him as a
cut-throat struggle in which deadly antagonists are pitted against
one another in a contest for each one of the goods of life. Sus-
picion and cruelty are his trusted weapons in the strife and he
gives no mercy, as he asks none.

Chapter VI

THE NORTH-WEST COAST OF AMERICA

The Indians who lived on the narrow strip of Pacific sea-
coast from Alaska to Puget Sound were a vigorous and over-
bearing people. They had a culture of no common order.
Sharply differentiated from that of the surrounding tribes, it had
a zest which it is difficult to match among other peoples. Its
values were not those which are commonly recognized, and its
drives not those frequently honoured.

They were a people of great possessions as primitive peoples
go. Their civilization was built upon an ample supply of goods,
inexhaustible, and obtained without excessive expenditure of
labour. The fish, upon which they depended for food, could
be taken out of the sea in great hauls. Salmon, cod, halibut,
seal, and candlefish were dried for storage or tried out for oil.
Stranded whales were always utilized, and the more southern
tribes went whaling as well. Their life would have been im-
possible without the sea. The mountains abutted sharply upon
their shore territory ; they built upon the beaches. It was a
country wonderfully suited to the demands they put upon it.
The deeply indented coast was flanked with numberless islands
which not only trebled the shoreline, but gave great sheltered
areas of water and protected navigation from the unbroken
sweep of the Pacific. The sea life that haunts this region is
proverbial. It is still the great spawning ground of the world,
and the .tribes of the North-West Coast knew the calendar of
the fish runs as other peoples have known the habits of bears
or the season for putting seed into the earth. Even in the
rare cases when they depended upon some product of the earth,
as when they cut the great trees that they split into boards
for their houses or hollowed with fire and adzes for canoes,
they held close to the waterways. They knew no transportation
except by water, and every tree was cut close enough to a stream
or inlet so that it could be floated down to the village.

They kept up constant intercommunication by means of sea-
going canoes. They were adventurous, and expeditions pushed
far to the north and south. Marriages, for persons of prestige,
were arranged with the nobility of other tribes, and invitations

125

128

PATTERNS OF CULTURE

the vision, the experience which in so many parts of North
America gave to the suppliant, fasting in isolation and often
torturing himself, the guardian spirit who aided him for life.
On the North-West Coast the personal encounter with the spirit
had become a formal matter, nothing more than a way of phrasing
the right to join a coveted secret society. But in proportion as
the vision had become an empty form, the emphasis had been
placed upon the divine madness incumbent upon one who had
a right to supernatural power. The Kwakiutl youth about to
become a member of one of their religious societies was snatched
away by the spirits, and remained in the woods in isolation for
the period during which he was said to be held by the super-
naturals. He fasted that he might appear emaciated, and he
prepared himself for the demonstration of frenzy which he must
give upon his return. The whole Winter Ceremonial, the great
Kwakiutl series of religious rites, was given to “ tame ’’ the
initiate who returned full of the power that destroys man’s
reason ” and whom it was necessary to bring back to the level
of secular existence.

The initiation of the Cannibal Dancer was peculiarly calcu-
lated to express the Dionysian purport of North-West Coast
culture. Among the Kwakiutl the Cannibal Society outranked
all others. Its members were given the seats of highest honour
at the winter dances, and all others must hold back from the feast
till the Cannibals had begun to eat. That which distinguished
the Cannibal from the members of all other religious societies
was his passion for human flesh. He fell upon the onlookers
with his teeth and bit a mouthful of flesh from their arms. His
dance was that of a frenzied addict enamoured of the food ”
that was held before him, a prepared corpse carried on the out-
stretched arms of a woman. On great occasions the Cannibal
ate the bodies of slaves who had been killed for the purpose.

This cannibalism of the Kwakiutl was at the farthest remove
from the epicurean cannibalism of many tribes of Oceania or
the customary reliance upon human flesh in the diet of many
tribes of Africa. The Kwakiutl felt an unmitigated repugnance
to the eating of human flesh. As the Cannibal danced trembling
before the flesh he was to eat, the chorus sang his song :

Now I am about to eat.

My face is ghastly pale.

I am about to eat what was given me by Cannibal
at the North End of the World.

THE NORTH-WEST COAST OF AMERICA 129

Count was kept of the mouthfuls of skin the Cannibal had taken
from the arms of the onlookers, and he took emetics until he
had voided them. He often did not swallow them at all

Much greater than the contamination of flesh bitten from
living aims was reckoned that of the flesh of the prepared corpses
and of the slaves killed for the cannibal ceremonies. For four
months after this defilement the Cannibal was tabu. He re-
mained alone in his small inner sleepmg-room, a Bear dancer
keeping watch at the door. He used special utensils for eating
and drinking and they were destroyed at the end of the period.
He drank always ceremonially, never taking but four mouthfuls
at a time, and never touching his lips to the cup. He had to
use a drinking- tube and a head-scratcher. For a shorter period
he was forbidden all warm food. When the period of his seclusion
was over, and he emerged again among men, he feigned to have
forgotten all the ordinary ways of life. He had to be taught
to walk, to speak, to eat. He was supposed to have departed
so far from this life that its ways were unfamiliar to him. Even
after his four months’ seclusion was ended, he was still sacrosanct.
He might not approach his wife for a year, nor gamble, nor do
any work. Traditionally he remained aloof for four years. The
veiy repugnance which the Kwakiutl felt towards the act of
eating human flesh made it for them a fitting expression of the
Dionysian virtue that lies in the terrible and the forbidden.

During the lime when the Cannibal initiate was secluded
alone in the woods, he procured a corpse from a tree where
It had been disposed. The skin had already been dried by
exposure, and he especially prepared it for his ‘‘ food ” in the
dance. In the meantime the period of his seclusion was drawing
to an end and the tribe were preparing for the Winter Dance
which was primarily his initiation as a member of the Cannibal
Society. The people of the tribe, according to their ceremonial
prerogatives, made themselves sacred. They called among them
the spirits of the Winter Dance, and those who had a right
to do so gave demonstrations of their supernatural frenzy. The
greatest effort and meticulousness of observance were necessary
because their power must be great enough to call back the Canni-
bal from his sojourn with the supernaturals. They called him
by strong dances and by the exercise of inherited powers, but
at first all their efforts were in vain.

At last all the Cannibal Society by their combined frenzy
roused the new initiate, who all of a sudden was heard upon

132 PATTERNS OF CULTURE

owned m a different fashion. It was not in the ownership of
the means of livelihood, however far that was carried, that
Kwakiull proprietorship chiefly expressed itself. Those things
which were supremely valued were prerogatives over and above
material well-being. Many of these were material things, named
house-posts and spoons and heraldic crests, but the greater
number were immaterial possessions, names, myths, songs, and
privileges which were the great boast of a man of wealth. All
these prerogatives, though they remained in a blood lineage,
were nevertheless not held in common, but were owned for the
time being by an individual who singly and exclusively exercised
the rights which they conveyed.

The greatest of these prerogatives, and the basis of all others,
were the nobility titles. Each family, each religious society, had
a series of titular names which individuals assumed according
to their rights of inheritance and financial ability. These titles
gave them the position of nobility in the tribe. They were used
as personal names, but they were names that according to
tradition had not been added to nor subtracted from since the
origin of the world. When a person took such a name he
assumed in his own person all the greatness of his ancestors
who had in their lifetime borne the name, and when he gave
it to his heir he necessarily laid aside all right to use it as
his own.

The assumption of such a name did not depend on blood
alone. In the first place, these titles were the right of the eldest
born, and youngest sons were without status. They were scorned
commoners. In the second place, the right to a title had to
be signalized by the distribution of great wealth. The women’s
engrossing occupation was not the household routine, but the
making of great quantities of mats, baskets, and cedar-mark
blankets, which were put aside in the valuable boxes made by
the men for the same purpose. Men likewise accumulated
canoes, and the shells or dentalia they used as money. Great
men owned or had out at interest immense quantities of goods,
which were passed from hand to hand like bank-notes to validate
the assumption of the prerogatives.

These possessions were the currency of a complex monetary
system which operated through the collection of extraordinary
rates of interest. One hundred per cent, interest was usual for
a year’s loan. Wealth was counted in the amount of property
which the individual had out at interest. Such usury would

THE NORTH-WEST COAST OF AMERICA 1 33

have been impossible except for the fact that sea food was abun-
dant and easy to secure, their supply of shells for money was
constantly augmented from the sea, and that fictitious units of
great values were used, the coppers These were etched
sheets of native copper valued as high as ten thousand blankets
and more. They had, of course, very small intrinsic worth
and were valued according to the amount that had been paid
for them when they last changed hands. Besides, the amassing
of the return payments was never the work of one individual
in any of the great exchanges. The entrepreneurs were figure-
heads of the entire local group, and, in intertribal exchanges,
of the entire tribe, and commanded for the occasion the goods
of all the individuals of their group.

Every individual of any potential importance, male or female,
entered this economic contest as a small child. As a baby he
had been given a name which indicated only the place where he
was born. When it was time for him to assume a name of
greater importance, the elders of his family gave him a number
of blankets to distribute, and upon receiving the name he dis-
tributed this property among his relatives. Those who received
the child’s gifts made it a point to repay him promptly and
with excessive interest. Whenever a chief who was one of these
beneficiaries distributed property at a public exchange soon
after, he gave the child treble what he had received. At the
end of the year the boy had to repay with one hundred per
cent, interest those who had originally financed him, but he
retained the remainder in his own name and this was the equiva-
lent of the original stock of blankets. For a couple of years he
distributed these, and collected interest, until he was ready to
pay for his first traditional potlatch name. When he was ready,
all his relatives gathered and all the elders of the tribe. In
the presence of all the people and before the chief and the old
men of the tribe his father then gave up to him a name which
designated his position in the tribe.

From this time the boy had a traditional position among
the titled men of the tribe. Thereafter at the potlatches he gave
or took part in he took still greater and greater names. A
person of any importance changes names as snakes change their
skins. The names indicated his family connections, his riches,
his status in the tribal structure. Whatever the occasion of
the potlatch, whether it was a marriage, the coming-of-age of
his grandchild, or an intertribal challenge to a rival chief, the

136 PATTERNS OF CULTURE

or shredded cedar bark for them to wipe it off again, were
wealth and were passed down in family lines. Among the
neighbouring Bella Coola, family myths became such exceed-
ingly valued and cherished property that it became the custom
for the nobility to marry within the family so that such wealth
should not be dissipated among those not born to hold it.

The manipulation of wealth on the North-West Coast is
clearly enough in many ways a parody on our own economic
arrangements. These tribes did not use wealth to get for them-
selves an equivalent value in economic goods, but as counters of
fixed value in a game they played to win. They saw life as a
ladder of which the rungs were the titular names with the owned
prerogatives that were vested in them. Each new step upwards
on the ladder called for the distribution of great amounts of
wealth, which nevertheless were returned with usury to make
possible the next elevation to which the climber might aspire.

This primary association of wealth with the validation of
nobility titles is, however, only a part of the picture. The
distribution of property was rarely so simple as this. The
ultimate reason why a man of the North-West Coast cared about
the nobility titles, the wealth, the crests and the prerogatives
lays bare the mainspring of their culture : they used them in
a contest in which they sought tO‘ shame their rivals. Each
individual, according to his means, constantly vied with all
Others to outdistance them in distributions of property. The
boy who had just received his first gift of property selected
another youth to receive a gift from him. The youth he chose
could not refuse without admitting defeat at the outset, and
he was compelled to cap the gift with an equal amount of
property. When the time came for repayment if he had not
double the original gift to return as interest he was shamed
and demoted, and his rival’s prestige correspondingly enhanced.
The contest thus begun continued throughout life. If he was
successful he played with continually increasing amounts of
property and with more and more formidable rivals. It was a
fight. They say, We do not fight with weapons. We fight
with property.” A man who had given away a copper had
overcome his rival as much as if he had overcome him in battle
array. The Kwakiutl equated the two. One of their dances
was called bringing blood into the house ”, and the hemlock
wreaths the men carried were said to represent heads taken
in warfare. These they threw into the fire, calling out the

THE NORTH-WEST COAST OF AMERICA

137

name of the enemies they represented and shouting as the fire
flared up to consume them* The wreaths, however, represented
the coppers they had given away, and the names they called
out were the names of the rivals whom they had vanquished
by the distribution of property.

The object of all KwakiutI enterprise was to show oneself
superior to one’s rivals. This will to superiority they exhibited
in the most uninhibited fashion. It found expression m uncen-
sored self-glorification and ridicule of all comers. Judged by
the standards of other cultures the speeches of their chiefs at
their potlatches are unabashed megalomania.

I am the great chief who makes people ashamed.

I am the great chief who makes people ashamed
Our chief brings shame to the faces
Our chief brings jealousy to the faces.

Our chief makes people cover their faces by what he is continually doing
in this world.

Giving again and again oil feasts to all the tribes

♦ ♦ >|C

I am the only great tree, I the chief *

I am the only great tree, I the chief’

You are my subordinates, tribes.

You sit in the middle of the rear of the house, tribes
I am the first to give you property, tribes.

I am your Eagle, tribes !

itc 41 4 c

Bring your counter of property, tnbes, that he may try m vain to count the
property that is to be given away by the great copper maker, the chief.
Go on, raise the unattainable potlatch-pole,

For this is the only thick tree, the only thick root of the tribes.

Now our chief will become angry in the house,

He will perform the dance of anger.

Our chief will perform the dance of fury.

4* 4c 4»

I am Yaqatlenlis, I am Cloudy, and also Sewid ; I am great Only
One, and I am Smoke Owner, and I am Great Inviter. These are
the names which I obtained as marriage gifts when I married the
daughters of the chiefs of the tribes wherever I went. Therefore I
feel like laughing at what the lower chiefs say, for they try in vain
to down me by talking against my name. Who approaches what
was done by the chiefs my ancestors? Therefore I am known by
all the tribes over all the world. Only the chief my ancestor gave
away property in a great feast, and all the rest can only try to imitate
me. They try to imitate the chief, my grandfather, who is the root
of my family.

140 PATTERNS OF CULTURE

given, he heaped insults upon his host, who then took some
further way of establishing his greatness.

For this purpose the host might send his messengers to break
in pieces four canoes and bring the pieces to heap upon the
fire. Or he might kill a slave. Or he might break a copper.
By no means all of the coppers that were broken at potlatches
were lost to the owner as wealth. There were many gradations
in the destruction of a copper. A chief who did not feel the
occasion great enough for the gift of his valuable copper might
cut out a section of it, and it was then necessary for his rival
to cut out a section from an equally valuable copper. The
return of goods followed the same course as if the whole copper
had been given. In contests with different rivals a copper
might be scattered many hundreds of miles along the coast.
When at last a great chief succeeded in acquiring the scattered
pieces, he had them riveted, and the copper had then a greatly
increased value.

According to Kwakiutl philosophy, the actual demolition of
the copper was only a variant of this practice. The great chief
would summon his tribe and declare a potlatch. Furthermore
such is my pride, that I will kill on this fire my copper Dandalayu
which is groaning in my house. You all know how much I
paid for it. I bought it for four thousand blankets. Now I
will break it in order to vanquish my rival. I will make my
house a fighting place for you, my tribe. Be happy, chiefs,
this is the first time that so great a potlatch has been given.’’
The chief put his copper upon the fire and it was consumed,
or from some great headland he cast it into the sea. He was
then stripped of his wealth, but he had acquired unparalleled
prestige. He had gained the final advantage over his rival,
who had to destroy a copper of equal value or retire in defeat
from the contest.

The behaviour which was required of the chief was arrogant
and tyrannical to a degree. There were necessarily cultural
checks upon too despotic an interpretation of a chief’s role. He
was not free to destroy property to the utter impoverishment
of his people or to engage in contests which were ruinous to
them. The great social check that acted to keep his activity
within limits they phrased as a moral tabu : the tabu on over-
doing. Overdoing was always dangerous, and a chief must keep
within bounds. These boundaries exacted by custom allowed,
as we shall see, many extreme courses, but the check was always

THE NORTH-WEST COAST OF AMERICA 14I

in readiness if a chief over-reached his claims on tribal support.
Good fortune, they believed, abandoned the man who went too
far, and he was no longer supported by his followers. Society
set limits, though the limits seem to us fantastic.

This will to superiority which was allowed such latitude
on the North-West Coast was expressed in every detail of their
potlatch exchanges. For great potlatches invitations were sent
out a year or more m advance, and great boatloads of nobles
came from distant tribes. The host opened the sale of a copper
with self-glorifying speeches and claims as to the greatness of
his name and of his copper. He challenged his guests to bring
out the property which they had ready for the return gift. The
guests began modestly, offering the merest fraction of the proper
value, and working gradually towards the climax. The party
of the seller received each added increment with scorn : “ Did
you think you had finished ? You weie not provident when
you resolved to buy this great copper. You have not finished ,
you will give more. The price of the copper will correspond
to my greatness. I ask four hundred more.” The purchaser
answered him, ‘‘Yes, chief, you have no pity,” and sent imme-
diately for the blankets that had been demanded of him. His
counter of blankets counted them aloud and addressed the
assembled tribes . “ Ya, tribes. Do you see our way of buying
blankets ? My tribe are strong when they buy coppers. They
are not like you. There are sixteen hundred blankets in the
pile I carry here. These are my words, chiefs of the Kwakiutl,
to those who do not know how to buy coppers.” When he
had finished, his chief rose and addressed the people : “ Now
you have seen my name. This is my name. This is the weight
of my name. This mountain of blankets rises through our
heavens. My name is the name of the Kwakiutl, and you
cannot do as we do, tribes. Look out, later on I shall ask you
to buy from me. Tribes, I do not look forward to the time
when you shall buy from me.”

But the sale of the copper had only begun. A chief of the
seller’s party rose and recounted his greatness and his privileges.
He told his mythological ancestry and he said : “I know how
to buy coppers. You always say you are rich, chief. Did you
not give any thought to this copper? Only give a thousand
blankets more, chief.” In this fashion the price of the copper
was increased until three thousand two hundred blankets had
been counted out in payment. Next the valuable boxes to put

144 PATTERNS OF CULTURE

days the daughters of Fast Runner remained in hiding, and
then, from the ashes of the slaves which had been preserved,
they apparently returned to life. Throw Away had nothing
to match this great demonstration of privilege, and he and his
men went off to fight the Nootka. Only one man returned
to tell of the defeat and death of the war party.

This is told as a true story, and there are eye-witness accounts
of other contests that vary only in the acts which the rival chiefs
performed to demonstrate their greatness. On one occasion
within the lifetime of men now living, the chief tried to put
out ’’ the fire of his rival with seven canoes and four hundred
blankets, while his host poured oil upon the fire in opposition.
The roof of the house caught fire and the whole house was
nearly destroyed, while those who were concerned kept their
places with assumed indifference and sent for more possessions
to heap upon the fire.

Then those who went to get the two hundred blankets returned,
and they spread them over the fire of the host Now they “ put it
out Then the host took more salal berries and crab-apples, and
the copper his daughter was carrying when she danced, and he
pushed it under the feast-fire The four young men who ladled
the oil poured the ladiesful into the fire, and the oil and the blankets
were burning together The host took the oil and poured it about
among his rivals

Such contests were the peak of ambition. Their picture of
the ideal man was drawn up m terms of these contests, and
all the motivations proper to them were reckoned as virtue.
An old chieftainess, addressing her son at a potlatch, admonished
him ■ “ My tribe, I speak particularly to my son. Friends,
you all know my name. You knew my father, and you know
what he did with his property. He was reckless and did not
care what he did. He gave away or killed slaves. He gave
away or burned his canoes in the fire of the feast-house. He
gave away sea-otter skins to his rivals in his own tribe or to chiefs
of other tribes, or he cut them to pieces. You know that what
I say is true. This, my son, is the road your father laid out
for you, and on which you must walk. Your father was no
common man. He was a true chief among the Koskimo. Do
as your father did. Either tear up the button blankets or give
them to the tribe which is our rival. That is all.” Her son
answered : I will not block the road my father laid out for
me. I will not break the law my chief laid down for me. I

THE NORTH-WEST COAST OF AMERICA

145

give these blankets to my rivals. The war that we are having
now is sweet and strong.’’ He distributed the blankets.

The occasions upon which distribution of property took this
form on the North-West Coast were legion. Many of them
were events which seem at the farthest remove from economic
exchange, and the behaviour proper among the Kwakiutl at
marriage, or death, or upon an accident is unintelligible until
we understand the peculiar psychology that underlay them. The
relations between the sexes, religion, and even misfortune were
elaborated in this culture in proportion as they offered occasion
for demonstrating superiority by the distnbution or destruction
of property. The chief occasions were those of the investiture
of an heir, of marriage, and of acquisition and demonstration
of religious powers, of mourning, of warfare, and of accident.

The investiture of an heir was an obvious occasion for uncen-
sored claims to greatness. Every name, every privilege, had to
be bestowed upon a man’s successor, and such bestowal had
to be validated by the characteristic distribution and destruction
of property. An armour of wealth ” had to be buckled upon
the liew incumbent. Potlatches of this kind were important and
complicated affairs, but the essential features of the proceedings
were nevertheless fairly simple. The following potlatch for
the greatness of his prince’s name Tlasotiwalis ” is a characteristic
one. It was a feast for all the tribes of the lineage, and when
they were assembled, the chief, the father of Tlasotiwalis, gave a
dramatic representation of privileges to which he was entitled
by the family myth, and proclaimed his son’s change of name.
The heir was now to assume one of the traditional prince’s names,
and the property was ready to distribute in his honour. At the
height of the dancing the chorus sang, in his father’s name, the
son composed for him :

Make way and let him have this [copper] with which I am always trying to
strike my rival chiefs.

Do not ask for mercy, tribes, putting out your tongues and pressing back
your hands.

And the young prince came out from the inner room carrying
the copper Dentalayu. His father addressed him with goading
admonitions : Ah, you are great, chief Tlasotiwalis ! Do you
really wish it? Is it reaUy your great wish to let it lie dead
by the side of the fire, this copper that has a name, this Denta-
layu ? Live up to your prerogatives ! For indeed you are
descended from extravagant chiefs who did thus with coppers

148 PATTERNS OF CULTURE

return upon the parents’ wedding payment, the most valued
possessions which were involved in the marriage transaction

The amount of the return payment and the times at
which it was given were determined by the importance of the
families, the number of offspring, and many other considerations
that varied for each marriage. The ceremony, however, was
fixed and dramatic. The father-in-law prepared for years in
advance. When the time came for the return payment he
called in all his debts and accumulated food in abundance,
blankets, boxes, dishes, spoons, kettles, bracelets, and coppers.
The bracelets were tied to sticks, ten to each stick, and the
spoons and dishes attached to long ropes, the anchor lines of
the canoe The relatives of the father-in-law gathered to
support him and to contribute to the display, and the relatives
of the son-in-law assembled in all their festival array upon
the platform of the son-in-law’s house overlooking the beach.
The father-in-law’s party made the “ canoe ” upon the beach.
It was a square some hundred feet in each direction laid down
upon the sand and formed of the lids of heirloom ceremonial
boxes painted with animal faces and inset with sea-otter teeth.
Down to this canoe they carried all the goods the father-in-law
had collected. From the front ends of the canoe they tied to
the son-in-law’s house platform the anchor lines to which the
carved wooden dishes and valuable spoons made of mountain-
goat horn had been attached. All the relatives of the father-in-
law entered the canoe and they and the son-in-law’s party
alternately sang their valuable songs. The wife of the son-in-
law, the woman whose bride-price was that day being repaid,
was in the canoe with her parents, loaded with ornaments which
she was conveying to her husband. The great dance of the
occasion was hers when she displayed her jewellery, an abalone
shell nose-ring so enormous that it had to be tied to her ears
for support, and ear-rings so heavy they were tied to the locks
of her hair. After she had danced, the father-in-law rose and
gave the title to all the property in the canoe to his son-in-law.
The chief property was m a small box which contained the
tokens of the privileges of the religious society memberships and
of the names which he was transferring to his son-in-law for the
use of his children.

As soon as the title to all the property had been given to
the son-in-law, his friends rushed down upon the canoe with
axes in their hands and split one of the box covers that formed

THE NORTH-WEST COAST OF AMERICA I49

the canoe, shouting, Now our loaded canoe is broken,” while
the son-in-law responded, Let us be glad.” It was called sink-
ing the canoe, and it signified the fact that the son-in-law would
immediately distribute all the wealth contained in it among
the tribe. That is, he would place it out at interest to augment
his property further. It was a climax in the career of any
man, and the song that belonged to the son-in-law on this
occasion expressed the triumph of a chief at the apex of his
power :

I will go and tear in pieces Mount Stevens
I will use It for stones for my fire.

I will go and break Mount Katstais,

I will use It for stones for my fire

Through four marriages an ambitious man sought to accumu-
late the title to more and more valuable prerogatives and to
collect the return payments upon the bride-price. If an alliance
of this kind was considered desirable and there was no marriage-
able daughter, the transfer might still take place. The son-in-law
married, so they said, “ the left foot ” of his father-m-Iaw or his
“ right arm ” or some other part of his body. That is, a pre-
tended marriage was performed with the same ceremonies as
the real one, and by this means the pnvileges were transferred.
If it is clear in such cases that marriage had become on the
North-West Coast a formal method of transferring privileges, it
is even more striking in many of the accounts of intertribal
marriages that resulted in jealous warfare. The marriage of a
noblewoman into another group lost to the people of her tribe
dances and privileges they might be very loath to have pass
from them. In one such case the tribe from which the father-in-
law had originally obtained the dance were outraged at a marriage
by which the dance passed to a rival chieftain. They pretended
to give a feast and invited the father-in-law and his tribe. When
all were assembled, they fell upon them and killed the father-
in-law and many of his friends. In this way they prevented the
title to the dance from passing to the rival chief who had con-
tracted the marriage and who would have obtained it upon
the return of the bride-price. The chief, however, who by the
death of his father-in-law had lost the right to the dance he
coveted, was not to be so easily put off. He contracted another
marriage with the daughter of the man who had killed his
father-in-law and had therefore claimed the dance for his own.

PATTERNS OF CULTURE

150

and he thus obtained the dance he had set out to acquire in his
first marriage.

In every possible way marriage on the North-West Coast
was a business transaction and followed the same peculiar rules.
A woman who had borne a child so that the bride-price had
been repaid with sufficient goods was regarded as having been
redeemed by her blood kin. To allow her to stay in his house
for nothing’’ was, of course, beneath the husband’s dignity. So
he paid his father-in-law anew for her that he might not be
the recipient of any unpaid-for favour.

In case there was dissatisfaction between the two parties to
the marriage exchange, open conflict might break out between
the son-m-law and his father-in-law. In one case the father-in-
law gave blankets and a name to his son-in-law for the initiation
of his youngest child, and the son-in-law, instead of distributing
the blankets among the rival local groups, passed them off among
his own relatives. This was a deadly insult, for it implied that
the gift had been negligible, too small for the greatness of his
name. The father-in-law retaliated and for the shame put upon
him took back to his own village his daughter and her two
children. The father-in-law intended this as a crushing blow,
but by assuming indifference and abandoning his wife and
children, the son-in-law turned the tables upon him. Then
his father-in-law was shamed because his son-in-law would not
pay to see his own children.” The son-in-law took another
wife and continued on his career.

In another case the chief whose father-in-law had unduly
delayed the return gift became impatient. He carved an image
representing his wife and invited all the tribe to a feast. In
the presence of all the people he put a stone around the neck
of the image and threw it into the sea. To wipe out such an
indignity it would have been necessary for the father-in-law to
distribute and destroy far more property than he possessed, so
that by this means the son-in-law destroyed the high rank of
his wife and through her that of his father-in-law. Of course
the marriage was dissolved,

A man who did not himself inherit nobility titles could hope
to gain standing by a marriage with a woman of a higher rank.
He was usually a younger son who was barred from high status
by the practice of primogeniture. If he married well and
acquired wealth by an able manipulation of his debts, he was
sometimes able to establish himself among the great men of the

THE NORTH-WEST COAST OF AMERICA I5I

tribe. But the way was hard. It was a disgrace to the woman^s
family to have her united to a commoner, and the usual exchange
of property at marriage was impossible, for the groom was
unable to assemble the necessary goods, A marriage unrecog-
nized by a potlatch was said to be ''a sticking together like
dogs and the children of such a marriage were scorned as
illegitimate. If his wife gave him nobility titles that were in
her possession, a man was said to have obtained them for nothing,
and it was a cause of shame to the family. “ Their name was
disgraced and became a bad name because she had a common
man for her husband.’’ Even though he accumulated property
and validated the right to his names, the shame was remembered
by the tribes and the chiefs might unite against him and break
down his pretensions by worsting him in a potlatch. In one
case in which the commoner husband of a noblewoman had
attained high standing through the use of money earned from
the whites, the chiefs brought together all their coppers to over-
come him. According to the story in which they perpetuated
his shame, they broke three coppers, of values of twelve thousand
blankets, of nine thousand blankets, and of eighteen thousand
blankets, and the pretender could not get together thirty-nine
thousand blankets to buy enough coppers to match those that
had been broken. He was defeated and his children assigned
to other families that they, being half-noble, might not share
m his disgrace.

Marriage was not the only way in which it was possible to
acquire prerogatives. The means which was most honoured was
the murder of the owner. The man who killed another took
his name, his dances, and his crests. Tribes which because of
the antagonism of the owners were not able to obtain the title
to coveted dances and masks could still waylay a travelling
canoe in which one man was known to own the ceremonial.
The slayer then had the right to the dance, which he put at the
disposal of his chief or elder brother who initiated his nephew
or his son and gave to him the name and dance of the dead
man. Such a means of transfer implied, of course, that the
whole ceremony, with the words of the songs, the steps of the
dances, and the use of the sacred objects, was known to the
owner before he had killed its possessor. It was not knowledge
of the ceremony he acquired. It was the title to it as property.
The fact that the prerogatives of a victim in warfare could
be claimed by the slayer undoubtedly reflects earlier historical

PATTERNS OF CULTURE

152

conditions when the characteristic North-West Coast prestige
conflict was carried on chiefly by warfare, and the contest
with property was of lesser importance.

Not only from human beings could privileges be obtained
on the North-West Coast by killing the owner ; this was also
a favourite means of obtaining power from the gods. A man
who met and killed a supernatural being gained from him his
ceremony and mask. All peoples are likely to use towards the
supernaturals the behaviour they place most reliance upon in
human relations, but it is not often that homage is so little
regarded and that so far from awe being the required attitude
towards the supernaturals the most rewarding behaviour is to
kill or to shame them. It was accepted practice upon the
North-West Coast.

By still another method a man could obtain certain pre-
rogatives without inheriting them and without buying them.
This was by becoming a religious practitioner. In becoming a
shaman one was initiated by the supernatural beings, not by
a father or an uncle, and one obtained the recognized names
and privileges from the spiritual visitant. Shamans therefore
owned and exercised prerogatives according to the order of
spirits but the privileges which they owned were regarded
in the same manner as the privileges which had been inherited,
and they were used in the same fashion.

The traditional way in which one became a shaman was
by a cure in severe illness. Not all who were cured of sickness
were thereafter shamans, but only those who were put away
by themselves in a house in the woods for the spirits to cure.
If the supernatural beings came to a man there and gave him
a name and instructions, he followed then the same course that
was followed by any initiate inheriting prerogatives. That is,
he came back in the power of the spirits and demonstrated his
newly acquired privileges. He announced his name and showed
his power by curing someone who was sick. Then he distributed
property to validate his new name and entered upon his career
as a shaman.

Shamans used their prerogatives in the same way that chiefs
and nobles used theirs, in a contest of prestige. The shamans
held up to ridicule the supernatural pretensions of their rivals
and contested with them to show their superior power. Each
shaman had a trick that differed slightly from those of his rivals,
and his supporters exalted his procedures at the expense of those

THE NORTH-WEST COAST OF AMERICA I 53

of Other shamans. Some shamans sucked out illness, some
rubbed, some restored lost souls. A favourite device was to
produce the illness from the body of the patient in the form
of a small worm In order to be prepared for this demons-
tration, the shaman carried a roll of bird’s down between his
teeth and his upper hp. When he was called upon to cure,
he first rinsed his mouth with water. When he had thus proved
that he had nothing in his mouth, he danced and sucked and
finally bit his cheeks so that his mouth was full of bloody saliva.
He spat out the roll of down into a bowl with the blood he
had supposedly sucked also from the seat of illness, and when he
had rinsed the “ worm ”, he exhibited it as evidence that he
had removed the cause of pain and illness. Often several
shamans tried their powers in a single cure, and those whose
performances were unsuccessful lost face m the same way as
a chief who was worsted in a contest for a copper. They were
overcome and died of shame, or they might band together and
kill the successful competitor. It was considered likely enough
that anyone who overcame in shamanizing would be killed by
his defeated rivals. No shaman’s death was avenged, for his
power was supposed to be used to harm as well as to cure, and
as a sorcerer he had no claim to protection.

In another direction also shamanism among the Kwakiutl
had come to parallel the secular contest that centred around
crests and the validating of titular names. Just as an initiation
into the Cannibal Society was a dramatic performance put on
for the occasion, and the vision which elsewhere was believed
to be an experience of personal contact with the supernatural
became a mere formal dogma, so also in shamanism the personal
propitiation of the spirits was lost sight of in the acquinng of tricks
and the training of accomplices for the dramatic validation of
the medicine man’s claims. Each shaman had a helper, who
might better be called his spy. It was his duty to mix with
the people and to report to his master in what part of the body
sick people felt pain. If the shaman was then called to cure,
he showed his supernatural power by directing all his attention
to the ailing member. The spy reported likewise if anyone
complained of lassitude. At any general curing, therefore, the
shamans showed their power by divining that these persons’
souls needed to be recovered. The spies went great distances by
canoes carrying messages which were interpreted as inspirations
from the spirits.

154 PATTERNS OF CULTURE

The subterfuges of the shamans and their spies were not
a matter of indifference either to the shamans themselves or
to their people. Many peoples regard supernatural power as
expressing itself naturally through man-manipulated tricks. The
Kwakiutl did not. Only a shaman driven to despair, like Good-
over-all-the-Earth, admitted that he made his raven rattle bite
his hand by a feat of jugglery. Then the people knew that
he was common, for he had made up all that he did in
shamanism He withdrew in shame and went crazy within
the year. A shaman whose trick was detected was similarly
defeated. One medicine man used to take a stuffed squirrel
out of his neckband and make it run up his arm. After he
had danced with it and demonstrated that he could make it
come alive, his secret helper on the roof moved a plank so that
he could let down a string which the shaman slipped over his
squirrel and let it fly up to the roof. Then he called it down
again. The audience noticed that he stood always in one place
in the house to call his squirrel and someone' went to the roof
and discovered a place over which a thin shingle had been laid.
The shaman gave up practising, he never went out any more,
and like Good-over-all-the-Earth he also died of shame. Thus
shamans among the Kwakiutl were accustomed to use under-
ground means to put across their performances, and if they
were discovered it was regarded as the equivalent of defeat in
a potlatch contest.

Like any secular chief, a shaman had to validate his pre-
rogatives by the distribution of property, and when he performed
a cure he was rewarded according to the wealth and rank of
the family of the sick person as in any distribution of property.
Shamanism, the Kwakiutl say, was that which makes it easy to
obtain property It was a way of obtaining without inherit-
ance or purchase valuable privileges which could be used to
raise one’s status.

Inheritance and purchase might even, in Kwakiutl practice,
be the means of acquiring shamanistic privileges, just as they
were the means of acquiring all other prerogatives. It is obvious
that the shamanistic tricks had to be taught and the shamans
who taught them to novices certainly had to be paid. It is
impossible to say how commonly supernatural powers were
inherited. Men sometimes initiated their sons as shamans after
they had retired to the woods for a period as the Cannibal dancers
did. The great shaman Fool vomited up his quartz crystal

THE NORTH-WEST COAST OF AMERICA 1 55

from his body and threw it into the body of his son, who became
thereby a shaman of the highest degree. His father lost by
this act, of course, all his rights to practise shamanism.

Behaviour on the North-West Coast was dominated at every
point by the need to demonstrate the greatness of the individual
and the inferiority of his rivals. It was carried out with uncen-
sored self-glorification and with gibes and insults poured upon
the opponents. There was another side to the picture. The
Kwakiutl stressed equally the fear of ridicule, and the inter-
pretation of experience in terms of insults. They recognized
only one gamut of emotion, that which swings between victory and
shame. It was in term of affronts given and received that economic
exchange, marriage, political life, and the practice of religion
were carried on. Even this, however, gives only a partial picture
of the extent to which this preoccupation with shame dominated
their behaviour. The North-West Coast carried out this same
pattern of behaviour also in relation to the external world and
the forces of nature. All accidents were occasions upon which
one was shamed. A man whose axe slipped so that his foot
was injured had immediately to wipe out the shame which had
been put upon him. A man whose canoe had capsized had
similarly to wipe his body of the insult. People must at all
costs be prevented from laughing at the incident. The universal
means to which they resorted was, of course, the distribution
of property. It removed the shame ; that is, it re-established
again the sentiment of superiority which their culture associated
with potlatching. All minor accidents were dealt with in this
way. The greater ones might involve giving a winter cere-
monial, or head-hunting, or suicide. If a mask of the Cannibal
Society was broken, to wipe out the count a man had to give a
winter ceremonial and initiate his son as a Cannibal. If a man
lost at gambling with a friend and was stopped of his property,
he had recourse to suicide.

The great event which was dealt with in these terms was
death. Mourning on the North-West Coast cannot be under-
stood except through the knowledge of the peculiar arc of
behaviour which this culture institutionalized. Death was the
paramount affront they recognized, and it was met as they
met any major accident, by distribution and destruction of
property, by head-hunting, and by suicide. They took recog-
nized means, that is, to wipe out the shame. When a chief's
near relative died, he gave away his house ; that is, the planks of

156 PATTERNS OF CULTURE

the walls and the roof were ripped from the framework and
carried off by those who could afford it. For it was potlatching
in the ordinary sense, and every board must be repaid with
due interest. It was called craziness strikes on account of
the death of a loved one and by means of it the Kwakiutl
handled mourning by the same procedures that they used at
marriage, at the attainment of supernatural powers, or in a
quarrel.

There was a more extreme way of meeting the affront of
death. This was by head-hunting. It was in no sense retaliation
upon the group which had killed the dead man. The dead
relative might equally have died in bed of disease or by the
hand of an enemy. The head- hunting was called killing to
wipe one’s eyes ”, and it was a means of getting even by making
another household mourn instead. When a chief’s son died,
the chief set out in his canoe. He was received at the house
of a neighbouring chief, and after the formalities he addressed
his host, saying, My prince has died to-day, and you go with
him.” Then he killed him. In this, according to their inter-
pretation, he acted nobly because he had not been downed, but
had struck back in return. The whole proceeding is meaningless
without the fundamental paranoid reading of bereavement.
Death, like all the other untoward accidents of existence, con-
founded man’s pride and could only be handled in terms of
shame.

There are many stories of this behaviour at death. A chief’s
sister and her daughter had gone , up to Victoria, and either
because they drank bad whisky or because their boat capsized
they never came back. The chief called together his warriors.

Now I ask you, tribes, who shall wail ? Shall I do it or shall
another ? ” The spokesman answered, of course : Not you,

chief. Let some other of the tribes.” Immediately they set up
the war pole to announce their intention of wiping out the
injury and gathered a war party. They set out and found
seven men and two children asleep and killed them. ** Then
they felt good when they arrived at Sebaa in the evening.”

A man now living describes an experience of his in the ’70’s
when he had gone fishing for dentalia. He was staying with
Tlabid, one of the two chiefs of the tribe. That night he was
sleeping under a shelter on the beach when two men woke him,
saying : “ We have come to kill Chief Tlabid on account of
the death of the princess of our Chief Gagaheme. We have

THE NORTH-WEST COAST OF AMERICA 1 57

here three large canoes and we are sixty men. We cannot go
home to our country without the head of Tlabid.’’ At breakfast,
the visitor told Tlabid, and Tlabid said, Why, my dear, Gaga-
heme is my own uncle, for the mother of his father and of my
mother are one ; therefore he cannot do any harm to me.”
They ate, and after they had eaten, Tlabid made ready and said
he would go to get mussels at a small island outside the village.
The whole tribe forbade their chief to go mussel-gathering, but
Tlabid laughed at what his tribe said. He took his cape and
his paddle and went out of the door of his house. He was
angry, and therefore none of his tribe spoke. He launched his
canoe and when it was afloat his young son went aboard and
sat in the bow with his father. Tlabid paddled away, steering
away for a small island where there were many mussels. When
he was half-way across three large canoes came in sight, fuU of
men, and as soon as Tlabid saw them, he steered his canoe
towards them. Now he did not paddle, and two of the canoes
went landward of him and one canoe seaward, and the bows
of all three canoes were in a line. The three canoes did not
stop, and then the body of Tlabid could be seen standing up
headless. The warriors paddled away, and when they were
out of sight the tribe launched a small canoe and went to tow
in the one in which Tlabid was lying dead. The child never
cried, for his heart failed him on account of what had been
done to his father.” When they arrived at the beach they
buried the great chief.

A person whose death was determined upon to wipe out
another’s death was chosen for one consideration : that his rank
was the equivalent of that of the dead. The death of a com-
moner wiped out that of a commoner, of a prince that of a
princess. If, therefore, the bereaved struck down a person of
equal rank, he had maintained his position in spite of the blow
that had been dealt him.

The characteristic Kwakiutl response to frustration was sulk-
ing and acts of desperation. If a boy was struck by his father,
or if a man’s child died, he retired to his pallet and neither ate
nor spoke. When he had determined upon a course which
would save his threatened dignity, he rose and distributed
property, or went head-hunting, or committed suicide. One
of the commonest myths of the Kwakiutl is that of the young
man who is scolded by his father or mother and who after lying
for four days motionless upon his bed goes out into the woods

158 PATTERNS OF CULTURE

intent on suicide. He jumps into waterfalls and from precipices,
or tries to drown himself in lakes, but he is saved from
death by a supernatural who accosts him and gives him power.
Thereupon he returns to shame his parents by his great-
ness.

In practice suicide was comparatively common. The mother
of a woman who was sent home by her husband for unfaith-
fulness was shamed and strangled herself. A man whose son
stumbled in his initiation dance, not being able to finance a
second winter ceremonial, was defeated and shot himself.

Even if death is not taken into the hands of the shamed
person in actual suicide, deaths constantly are regarded as due
to shame. The shaman who was outjuggled in the curing dance,
the chief who was worsted in the breaking of coppers, the boy
worsted in a game, are all said to have died of shame. Irregular
marriages take, however, the greatest toll. In these cases it was
the father of the bridegroom who was most vulnerable, for it
was the groom’s prestige which was primarily raised by the
marriage transfer of property and privileges, and his father
therefore lost heavily in an irregular marriage.

The Kwakiutl tell of the death from shame of an old chief
of one of their villages. His youngest son, years before, had
gone with the daughter of respected slaves to a distant inlet.
This was no matter for comment, for the younger sons were dis-
regarded and of low caste. He and his wife had a beautiful
daughter, and when she was of a marriageable age an elder
brother of her father’s saw her and obtained her in marriage
without knowing her origin. They had a son and the elder
brother gave his own noble name to his child. He took the
family and his wife’s parents home to his father, the old chief,
who when he recognized his youngest son fell dead with shame ;
for his noble son had given his name to the offspring of the
‘‘ common little daughter of his youngest son Then the
youngest son was happy because he had tricked his noble brother
into marrying his daughter and had obtained one of the titular
names for his grandchild.

The shame of the old chief at the marriage had in it no
element of protest at the marriage of near kin. The marriage
with the younger brother’s daughter in case the younger brother
was not outside the nobility altogether, was a traditionally
approved marriage and very popular in some families. Aristo-
cracy on the North-West Coast had become so thoroughly associ-

THE NORTH-WEST COAST OF AMERICA

159

ated with primogeniture that “pride of blood”, which we
associate with aristocracy, was not recogmzed.

The sulking and the suicides on the North-West Coast are
the natural complement of their major preoccupations. The
gamut of the emotions which they recogmzed, from triumph to
shame, was magnified to its utmost proportions. Triumph was
an uninhibited indulgence in delusions of grandeur, and shame
a cause of death. Knowing but the one gamut, they used it for
every occasion, even the most unlikely.

All the rewards of their society they bestowed upon the
person who could deal with existence in these terms. Every
event, both the acts of one’s fellows and the accidents dealt
out by the material environment, threatened first and foremost
one’s ego security, and definite and specific techniques were
provided to reinstate the individual after the blow. If he could
not avail himself of these techniques, he had no recourse except
to die. He had staked everything, in his view of life, upon a
grandiose picture of the self, and when the bubble of his self-esteem
was pricked, he had no security to fall back upon, and the
collapse of his inflated ego left him prostrate.

His relation to his fellows was similarly dictated by this same
psychology. To maintain his own status he dealt out insults
and ridicule to his neighbours. The object of his endeavours
was to “ flatten ” their pretensions by the weight of his own,
to “ break ” their names. The Kwakiutl earned this behaviour
even into their dealings with their gods. The final insult they
could use to a man was to caU him a slave ; hence when they
had prayed for good weather and the wind did not change,
they put upon their supernaturals the same affront. An old
traveller writes of the Tsimshian : “ When calamities are pro-
longed or thicken, they get enraged against God and vent their
anger against him, raising their eyes and hands in savage anger
to heaven, stamping their feet on the ground and repeating,
‘ You are a great slave.’ It is their greatest term of reproach.”

They did not suppose that supernatural beings were bene-
ficent. They knew that hurricanes and avalanches were not,
and they attnbuted to their gods the characteristics of the
natural world. One of these, Cannibal at the North End of the
River, employed a female slave to supply him with corpses.
His guard, the Raven, ate their eyes, and another fabulous
bird, his slave, fractured the skulls with his beak and sucked
out the human brains. Supernatural beings were not supposed

l60 PATTERNS OF CULTURE

to have benevolent intentions. The first thing a canoe-builder
had to do after he had adzed his canoe was to paint the face
of a man on each side to frighten away the dead canoe-builders
who would certainly cause it to split if they were not prevented.
This is a far cry from the friendly and helpful relations that the
priests of Zuhi count upon with those who have previously
exercised their profession. On the North-West Coast these were
exactly the group whose hands were lifted against their living
colleagues. As we have seen, a recognized way of obtaining
blessings from the gods was to kill them. Then one triumphed
and was rewarded by supernatural power.

The segment of human behaviour which the North-West
Coast has marked out to institutionalize in its culture is one
which is recognized as abnormal in our civilization, and yet it
is sufficiently close to the attitudes of our own culture to be
intelligible to us and we have a definite vocabulary with which
we may discuss it. The megalomaniac paranoid trend is a
definite danger in our society. It faces us with a choice of
possible attitudes. One is to brand it as abnormal and repre-
hensible, and it is the attitude we have chosen in our civilization.
The other extreme is to make it the essential attribute of ideal
man, and this is the solution in the culture of the North-West
Coast.

Chapter VII

THE NATURE OF SOCIETY

The three cultures of Zuni, of Dobu, and of the Kwakiutl are
not merely heterogeneous assortments of acts and beliefs. They
have each certain goals towards which their behaviour is directed
and which their institutions further. They differ from one
another not only because one trait is present here and absent
there, and because another trait is found in two regions in
two different forms. They differ still more because they are
oriented as wholes in different directions. They are travelling
along different roads in pursuit of different ends, and these ends
and these means in one society cannot be judged m terms of those
of another society, because essentially they are incommensur-
able.

All cultures, of course, have not shaped their thousand items
of behaviour to a balanced and rhythmic pattern. Like certain
individuals, certain social orders do not subordinate activities
to a ruling motivation. They scatter. If at one moment they
seem to be pursuing certain ends, at another they are off on
some tangent apparently inconsistent with all that has gone
before, which gives no clue to activity that will come after.

This lack of integration seems to be as characteristic of
certain cultures as extreme integration is of others. It is not
everywhere due to the same circumstances. Tribes like those
of the interior of British Columbia have incorporated traits from
all the surrounding civilizations. They have taken their patterns
for the manipulation of wealth from one culture area, parts
of their religious practices from another, contradictory bits from
still another. Their mythology is a hodge-podge of unco-
ordinated accounts of culture heroes out of three different myth-
cycles represented in areas around them. Yet in spite of such
extreme hospitality to the institutions of others, their culture
gives an impression of extreme poverty. Nothing is carried far
enough to give body to the culture. Their social organization
is little elaborated, their ceremonial is poorer than that m almost
any other region of the world, their basketry and beading tech-
niques give only a limited scope for activity in plastic arts. Like
certain individuals who have been indiscriminately influenced

i6i

1 62 PATTERNS OF CULTURE

in many different directions, their tribal patterns of behaviour
are uncoordinated and casual.

In these tribes of British Columbia the lack of integration
appears to be more than a mere simultaneous presence of traits
collected from different surrounding peoples. It seems to go
deeper than that. Each facet of life has its own organization, but
it does not spread to any other. At puberty great attention
is paid to the magical education of children for the various
professions and the acquisition of guardian spirits. On the
western plains this vision practice saturates the whole complex
of adult life, and the professions of hunting and warfare are
dominated by correlated beliefs. But in British Columbia the
vision quest is one organized activity and warfare is quite another.
Similarly feasts and dances in British Columbia are strictly
social. They are festive occasions at which the performers mimic
animals for the amusement of the spectators. But it is strictly
tabu to imitate animals who are counted as possible guardian
spirits. The feasts do not have religious significance nor do
they serve as opportunities for economic exchange. Every
activity is segregated, as it were. It forms a complex of its own,
and Its motivations and goals are proper to its own limited
field and are not extended to the whole life of the people. Nor
does any characteristic psychological response appear to have
arisen to dominate the culture as a whole.

It is not always possible to separate lack of cultural integra-
tion of this sort from that which is due more directly to exposure
to contradictory influences. Lack of integration of this latter
type occurs often on the borders of well-defined culture areas.
These marginal regions are removed from close contact with
the most characteristic tribes of their culture and are exposed
to strong outside influences. As a result they may very often
incorporate into their social organization or their art techniques
most contradictory procedures. Sometimes they refashion the
inharmonious material into a new harmony, achieving a result
essentially unlike that of any of the well-established cultures
with which they share so many items of behaviour. It may
be that if we knew the past history of these cultures, we should
see that, given a sufficient period of years, disharmonious borrow-
ings tend to achieve harmony. Certainly in many cases they
do. But in the cross-section of contemporary primitive cultures
which is all that we can be sure of understanding, many marginal
areas are conspicuous for apparent dissonance.

THE NATURE OF SOCIETY 1 63

Other historical circumstances are responsible in other cases
for a lack of integration in certain cultures. It is not only the
marginal tribe whose culture may be uncoordinated, but the
tribe that breaks off from its fellows and takes up its position
in an area of different civilization. In such cases 'the conflict
that is most apparent is between the new influences brought
to bear upon the people of the tribe and what we may call
their indigenous behaviour. The same situation occurs also to
a people who have stayed at home, when a tribe with either
great prestige or great numbers is able to introduce major
changes in an area to which they have newly come.

An intimate and understanding study of a genuinely dis-
oriented culture would be of extraordinary interest. Probably
the nature of the specific conflicts or of the facile hospitality
to new influences would prove more important than any blanket
characterizations of “ lack of integration ”, but what such char-
acterizations would be we cannot guess. Probably in even the
most disoriented cultures it would be necessary to take account
of accommodations that tend to rule out disharmonious elements
and establish selected elements more securely. The process
might even be the more apparent for the diversity of material
upon which it operated.

Some of the best available examples of the conflict of dis-
harmonious elements are from the past history of tribes that
have achieved integration. The Kwakiutl have not always
boasted the consistent civilization which we have described.
Before they settled on the coast and on Vancouver Island, they
shared in general the culture of the Salish people to the south.
They still keep myths and village organization and relationship
terminology that link them with these people. But the Salish
tribes are individualists. Hereditary privileges are at a mini-
mum. Every man has, according to his ability, practically the
same opportunity as any other man. His importance depends
on his skill in hunting, or his luck in gambling, or his success in
manipulating his supernatural claims as a doctor or diviner.
There could hardly be a greater contrast than with the social
order of the North-West Coast.

Even this extreme contrast, however, did not militate against
Kwakiutl acceptance of the alien pattern. They came to regard
as private property even names, myths, house-posts, guardian
spirits, and the right to be initiated into certain societies. But
the adjustment that was necessary is still apparent in their institu-

164 PATTERNS OF CULTURE

tionSj and it is conspicuous at just those points where the two
social orders were at odds ; that is, in the mechanisms of the
social organization. For though the Kwakiutl adopted the whole
North-West Coast system of prerogatives and potlatches, they
did not similarly adopt the rigid matrilineal clans of the northern
tribes which provided a fixed framework within which the
privileges descended. The individual m the northern tribes
fitted automatically into the title of nobility to which he had
a right by birth. The individual among the Kwakiutl, as we
have seen, spent his life bargaining for these titles, and could
lay claim to any one that had been held in any branch of his
family. The Kwakiutl adopted the whole system of prerogatives,
but they left to the individual a free play m the game of prestige
which contrasted with the caste system of the northern tribes,
and retained the old customs of the south that the Kwakiutl
had brought with them to the coast.

Certain very definite cultural traits of the Kwakiutl are the
reflections of specific conflicts between the old and the new
configurations. With the new emphasis on property, inherit-
ance rules assumed a new importance. The interior Salish tribes
were loosely organized in families and villages, and most property
was destroyed at death. The rigid matrilineal clan system of
the northern tribes, as we have seen, did not gain acceptance
among the Kwakiutl, but they compromised by stressing the
right of the son-in-law to claim privileges from his wife’s father,
these privileges to be held in trust for his children. The inherit-
ance, therefore, passed matrilineally, but it skipped a generation,
as it were. In every alternate generation the prerogatives were
not exercised but merely held in trust. As we have seen, all
these privileges were manipulated according to the conventional
potlatch techniques. It was an unusual adjustment and one
which was clearly a compromise between two incompatible social
orders. We have described in an earlier chapter how thoroughly
they solved the problem of bringing two antagonistic social
orders into harmony.

Integration, therefore, may take place in the face of funda-
mental conflicts. The cases of cultural disorientation may well
be less than appear at the present time. There is always the
possibility that the description of the culture is disoriented rather
than the culture itself. Then again, the nature of the integration
may be merely outside our experience and difficult to perceive.
When these difficulties have been removed, the former by better

THE NATURE OF SOCIETY 1 65

field-work, the latter by more acute analysis, the importance
of the integration of cultures may be even clearer than it is
to-day. Nevertheless it is important to recognize the fact that
not all cultures are by any means the homogeneous structures we
have described for Zuhi and the Kwakiutl. It would be absurd
to cut every culture down to the Procrustean bed of some catch-
word characterization. The danger of lopping off important
facts that do not illustrate the main proposition is grave enough
even at best. It is indefensible to set out upon an operation
that mutilates the subject and erects additional obstacles against
our eventual understanding of it.

Facile generalizations about the integration of culture are
most dangerous in field-work. When one is mastering the lan-
guage and all the idiosyncrasies of behaviour of an esoteric culture^
preoccupation with its configuration may well be an obstacle to
a genuine understanding. The field-worker must be faithfully
objective. He must chronicle all the relevant behaviour, taking
care not to select according to any challenging hypothesis the
facts that will fit a thesis. None of the peoples we have dis-
cussed in this volume were studied in the field with any pre-
conception of a consistent type of behaviour which that culture
illustrated. The ethnology was set down as it came, with no
attempt to make it self-consistent. The total pictures are there-
fore much more convincing to the student. In theoretical dis-
cussions of culture, also, generalizations about the integration
of culture will be empty in proportion as they are dogmatic
and universalized. We need detailed information about con-
trasting limits of behaviour and the motivations that are dynamic
in one society and not in another. We do not need a plank of
configuration written into the platform of an ethnological school.
On the other hand, the contrasted goods which different cultures
pursue, the different intentions which are at the basis of their
institutions, are essential to the understanding both of different
social orders and of individual psychology.

The. relation of cultural integration to studies of Western
civilization and hence to sociological theory is easily misunder-
stood. Our own society is often pictured as an extreme example
of lack of integration. Its huge complexity and rapid changes
from generation to generation make inevitable a lack of har-
mony between its elements that does not occur in simpler societies.
The lack of integration is exaggerated and misinterpreted, how-
ever, in most studies because of a simple technical error. Primi-

PATTERNS OF CULTURE

1 66

tive society is integrated in geographical units. Western civiliza-
tion, however, is stratified, and different social groups of the
same time and place live by quite different standards and are
actuated by different motivations.

The effort to apply the anthropological culture area m
modern sociology can only be fruitful to a very limited degree
because different ways of living are to-day not primarily a
matter of spatial distribution. There is a tendency among
sociologists to waste time over the “ culture area concept
There is properly no such concept When traits group
themselves geographically, they must be handled geographically.
When they do not, it is idle to make a principle out of what
is at best a loose empirical category. In our civilization there
is, in the anthropological sense, a uniform cosmopolitan culture
that can be found m any part of the globe, but there is likewise
unprecedented divergence between the labouring class and the
Four Hundred, between those groups whose life centres in the
church and those whose life centres on the race-track. The
comparative freedom of choice in modern society makes possible
important voluntary groups which stand for as different prin-
ciples as the Rotary Clubs and Greenwich Village. The nature
of the cultural processes is not changed with these modern condi-
tions, but the unit m which they can be studied is no longer
the local group.

The integration of culture has important sociological conse-
quences and impinges upon several moot questions of sociology
and social psychology. The first of these is the controversy over
whether or not society is an organism. Most modern sociologists
and social psychologists have argued elaborately that society is
not and never can be anything over and above the individual
minds that compose it. As part of their exposition they have
vigorously attacked the “ group fallacy ”, the interpretation
which, they feel, would make thinking and acting a function of
some mythical entity, the group. On the other hand, those
who have dealt with diverse cultures, where the material shows
plainly enough that all the laws of individual psychology are
inadequate to explain the facts, have often expressed themselves
in mystical phraseology. Like Durkheim they have cried, The
individual does not exist,” or like Kroeber they have called
in a force he calls the superorganic to account for the cultural
process.

This is largely a verbal quarrel. No one of the so-called

THE NATURE OF SOCIETY 1 67

organicists really believes m any other order of mind than the
minds of the individuals in the culture, and on the other hand
even such a vigorous critic of the group-fallacy as Allport admits
the necessity of the scientific study of groups, “ the province of
the special science of sociology The argument between those
who have thought it necessary to conceive of the group as more
than the sum of its individuals and those who have not has
been largely between students handling different kinds of data.
Durkheim, starting from an early familiarity with the diversity
of cultures and especially with the culture of Australia, reiterated,
often in vague phraseology, the necessity of studies of culture.
Sociologists, on the other hand, dealing rather with our own
standardized culture, have attempted to demohsh a methodology
the need for which simply did not occur in their work.

It IS obvious that the sum of all the individuals in Zuni
make up a culture beyond and above what those individuals
have willed and created. The group is fed by tradition ; it is
“ time-binding ”. It is quite justifiable to call it an organic
whole. It is a necessary consequence of the animism embedded
in our language that we speak of such a group as choosing its ends
and having specific purposes ; it should not be held against
the student as an evidence of a mystic philosophy. These group
phenomena must be studied if we are to understand the history
of human behaviour, and individual psychology cannot of itself
account for the facts with which we are confronted.

In all studies of social custom, the crux of the matter is
that the behaviour under consideration must pass through the
needle’s eye of social acceptance, and only history in its widest
sense can give an account of these social acceptances and rejec-
tions. It is not merely psychology that is in question, it is also
history, and history is by no means a set of facts that can be
discovered by introspection. Therefore those explanations of
custom which derive our economic scheme from human com-
petitiveness, modem war from human combativeness, and all
the rest of the ready explanations that we meet in every magazine
and modern volume, have for the anthropologist a hollow ring.
Rivers was one of the first to phrase the issue vigorously. He
pointed out that instead of trying to understand the blood feud
from vengeance, it was necessary rather to understand vengeance
from the institution of the blood feud. In the same way it is
necessary to study jealousy from its conditioning by local sexual
regulations and property institutions.

I>A'rTERNS OF CULTURE

1 68

The difSculty with naive interpretations of culture in terms
of individual behaviour is not that these interpretations are those
of psychology, but that they ignore history and the historical
process of acceptance or rejection of traits. Any configurational
interpretation of cultures also is an exposition in terms of indi-
vidual psychology, but it depends upon history as well as upon
psychology. It holds that Dionysian behaviour is stressed in
the institutions of certain cultures because it is a permanent
possibility in individual psychology, but that it is stressed in
certain cultures and not in others because of historical events
that have in one place fostered its development and in others
have ruled it out. At different points in the interpretation of
cultural forms, both history and psychology are necessary ; one
cannot make the one do the service of the other.

This brings us to one of the most hotly debated of all the
controversies which impinge upon configurational anthropology.
This is the conflict as to the biological bases of social phenomena.
I have spoken as if human temperament were fairly constant
in the world, as if in every society a roughly similar distribution
were potentially available, and as if the culture selected from
these according to its traditional patterns and moulded the vast
majority of individuals into conformity. Trance experience, for
example, according to this interpretation, is a potentiality of a
certain number of individuals in any population. When it is
honoured and rewarded a considerable proportion will achieve
or simulate it, but in our civilization where it is a blot on the
family escutcheon the number will dwindle and those individuals
be classified with the abnormal.

But there is also another possible interpretation. It has been
vigorously contended that traits are not culturally selected but
biologically transmitted. According to this interpretation the
distinction is racial, and the Plains Indians seek visions because
this necessity is transmitted in the chromosomes of the race.
Similarly, the Pueblo cultures pursue sobriety and moderation
because such conduct is determined by their racial heredity.
If the biological interpretation is true, it is not to history that
we need to go to understand the behaviour of groups, but to
physiology.

This biological interpretation, however, has never been given
a firm scientific basis. In order to prove their point it would
be necessary for those who hold this view to show physiological
facts that account for even a small part of the social phenomena

THE NATURE OF SOCIETY

169

it is necessary to understand. It is possible that basal metabolism
or the functioning of the ductless glands may differ significantly
m different human groups and that such facts might give us
insight into differences in cultural behaviour. It is not an
anthropological problem, but when the physiologists and the
geneticists have provided the material it may be of value to
the students of cultural history.

The physiological correlations that the biologist may provide
in the future, however, so far as they concern hereditary trans-
mission of traits, cannot, at their best, cover all the facts as we
know them. The North American Indians are biologically of
one race, yet they are not all Dionysian in cultural behaviour.
Zuni is an extreme example of diametrically opposed motivations,
and this Apollonian culture is shared by the other Pueblos, one
group of which, the Hopi, are of the Shoshonean sub-group,
a group which is widely represented among Dionysian tribes
and to which the Aztec are said to be linguistically related.
Another Pueblo group is the Tewa, closely related biologically
and linguistically to the non-Pueblo Kiowa of the southern
plains. Cultural configurations, therefore, are local and do not
correlate with known relationships of the various groups. In
the same way there is no biological unity in the western plains
that sets these vision-seeking peoples off from other groups. The
tribes who inhabit this region are drawn from the widespread
Algonkian, Athabascan, and Siouan families, and each still
retains the speech of their particular stock. ^ All these stocks
include tribes who seek visions after the Plains fashion and
tribes who do not. Only those who live within the geographical
limits of the plains seek visions as an essential part of the equip-
ment of every normal able-bodied man.

The environmental explanation is stiU. more imperative, when
instead of considering distribution in space, we turn to dis-
tnbution in time. The most radical changes in psychological
behaviour have taken place in groups whose biological con-
stitution has not appreciably altered. This can be abundantly
illustrated from our own cultural background. European civiliza-
tion was as prone to mystic behaviour, to epidemics of psychic
phenomena, in the Middle Ages, as it was in the nineteenth
century to the most hard-headed materialism. The culture has
changed its bias without a corresponding change in the racial
constitution of the group-
ie The linguistic groupings in these cases correlate with biological relationship.

PATTERNS OF CULTURE

170

Cultural interpretations of behaviour need never deny that
a physiological element is also involved. Such a denial is based
on a misunderstanding of scientific explanations. Biology does
not deny chemistry, though chemistry is inadequate to explain
biological phenomena. Nor is biology obliged to work according
to chemical formula because it recognizes that the laws of
chemistry underlie the facts it analyses. In every field of science
it is necessary to stress the laws and sequences that most
adequately explain the situations under observation and never-
theless to insist that other elements are present, though they
can be shown not to have had crucial importance in the final
result. To point out, therefore, that the biological bases of
cultural behaviour in mankind are for the most part irrelevant
is not to deny that they are present. It is merely to stress the
fact that the historical factors are dynamic.

Experimental psychology has been forced to a similar emphasis
even in studies dealing with our own culture. Recent important
experiments dealing with personality traits have shovifn that
social determinants are crucial even in the traits of honesty and
leadership. Honesty in one experimental situation gave almost
no indication whether the child would cheat in another. There
turned out to be not honest-dishonest persons, but honest-dishonest
situations. In the same way in the study of leaders there proved
to be no uniform traits that could be set down as standard even
in our own society. The role developed the leader, and his
qualities were those that the situation emphasized. In these
“ situational ” results it has become more and more evident
that social conduct even in a selected society is “ not simply
the expression of a fixed mechanism that predetermines to a
specific mode of conduct, but rather a set of tendencies aroused
in variable ways by the specific problem that confronts us ”.

When these situations that even in one society are dynamic
in human behaviour are magnified into contrasts befween cul-
tures opposed to one another in goals and motivations to such
a degree as Zuni and the Kwakiutl, for instance, the conclusion
is inescapable. If we are interested in human behaviour, we
need first of all to understand the institutions that are provided
in any society. For human behaviour will take the forms those
institutions suggest, even to extremes of which the observer,
deep-dyed in the culture of which he is a part, can have no
intimation.

This observer will see the bizarre developments of behaviour

THE NATURE OF SOCIETY 17I

only in alien cultures, not in his own. Nevertheless this is
obviously a local and temporary bias. There is no reason to
suppose that any one culture has seized upon an eternal sanity
and will stand in history as a solitary solution of the human
problem. Even the next generation knows better. Our only
scientific course is to consider our own culture, so far as we are
able, as one example among innumerable others of the variant
configurations of human culture.

The cultural pattern of any civilization makes use of a
certain segment of the great arc of potential human purposes
and motivations, just as we have seen m an earlier chapter
that any culture makes use of certain selected material techniques
or cultural traits. The great arc along which all the possible
human behaviours are distributed is far too immense and too
full of contradictions for any one culture to utilize even any
considerable portion of it. Selection is the first requirement.
Without selection no culture could even achieve intelligibility,
and the intentions it selects and makes its own are a much
more important matter than the particular detail of technology
or the marriage formality that it also selects in similar fashion.

These different arcs of potential behaviour that different
peoples have selected and capitalized in their traditional institu-
tions are only illustrated by the three cultures we have described.
It is extremely improbable that the goals and motivations they
have chosen are those most characteristic of the world. These
particular illustrations were chosen because we know something
about them as living cultures, and therefore can avoid the doubts
that must always be present in the discussion of cultures it is no
longer possible to check from observation. The culture of the
Plains Indians is one, for instance, about which we have vast
information and which is singularly consistent. Its psychological
patterns are fairly clear from the native texts, the travellers
accounts, and the reminiscences and survivals of custom collected
by ethnologists. But the culture has not been functioning for
some time, and there is a reasonable doubt. One cannot easily
tell how practice squared with dogma, and what expedients were
common in adapting the one to the other. ^

Nor are these configurations we have discussed “ types ’’ in
the sense that they represent a fixed constellation of traits.
Each one is an empirical characterization, and probably is not
duplicated in its entirety anywhere else in the world. Nothing
could be more unfortunate than an effort to characterize all

172 PATTERNS OF CULTURE

cultures as exponents of a limited number of fixed and selected
types. Categories become a liability when they are taken as
inevitable and applicable alike to all civilizations and all events.
The aggressive, paranoid tendencies of Dobu and the North-
West Coast are associated with quite different traits m these
two cultures. There is no fixed constellation. The Apollonian
emphases in Zuni and in Greece had fundamentally different
developments. In Zufii the virtue of restraint and moderation
worked to exclude from their civilization all that was of a different
nature. Greek civilization, however, is unintelligible without
recognizing the Dionysian compensations it also institutionalized.
There is no ‘‘ law but several different characteristic courses
which a dominant attitude may take.

Patterns of culture which resemble each other closely may
not choose the same situations to handle in terms of their dominant
purposes. In modern civilization the man who is ruthless in
business competition is often a considerate husband and an
indulgent father. The obsessive pursuit of success in Western
civilization is not extended to family life to anything like the
same degree that is developed m commercial life. The institu-
tions surrounding the two activities are contrasted to an extent
that is not true, for instance, in Dobu. Conjugal life in Dobu is
actuated by the same motives as Kula trading. Even gardening
in Dobu is an appropriation of other gardeners’ yam tubers.
But gardening is often a routine activity that is little affected
whatever the pattern of the culture may be ; it is a situation
to which the dominant motives are not extended, or m which
they are curtailed.

This unevenness in the extent to which behaviour is coloured
by the dye of the cultural pattern is evident in Kwakiutl life.
We have seen that the characteristic Kwakiutl reaction to the
death of a noble adult was to carry out some plan for getting
even, to strike back against a fate that had shamed them. But a
young father and mother mourning for their baby need not
behave in this fashion. The mother’s lament is full of sorrow.
All the women come to wail, and the mother holds her dead
child in her arms, weeping over it. She has had carvers and
doll-makers make all kinds of playthings, and they are spread
about. The women wail, and the mother speaks to her child :

Ah, ah, ah, why have you done this to me, child ? You chose
me as your mother, and I tried to do everything for you. Look at
all your toys and all the things I have had made for you. Why do

THE NATURE OF SOCIETY 1 73

you desert me, child ? Is it because of something I did to you ?

I will try to do better when you come back to me, child Only do
this for me . get well right away in the place where you go, and
as soon as you are strong come back to me Please do not stay
away. Have mercy on me who am your mother, child.

She is praying her dead child to return and be born again a
second time from her body.

Kwakiutl songs also are full of grief at the parting of loved
ones :

Oh, he IS going far away. He will be taken to the pretty place named New
York, my dear

Oh, could I fly like a poor little raven by his side, my love.

Oh, could I fly' by the side of my dear, my love
Oh, could I he down by the side of my dear, my pam
The love for my dear kills my body, my master.

The words of him who keeps me alive kill my body, my dear
For he said that he will not turn his face this way for two years, my love.
Oh, could I be the featherbed for you to he down upon, my dear
Oh, could I be the pillow for your head to rest upon, my dear
Good-bye ’ I am downcast. I weep for my love.

However, even in these Kwakiutl songs grief is mingled with a
sense of the shame that has been brought upon the sufferer, and
then the sentiment turns to bitter mockery and the desire to
even the scales again. The songs of jilted maidens and youths
are not far from similar expressions that are familiar to us in
our own culture ;

Oh how, my lady love, can my thoughts be conveyed to you, my thoughts
of your deed, my lady love ’

It is the object of laughter, my lady love, it is the object of laughter, your
deed, my lady love

It IS the object of contempt, my lady love, it is the object of contempt, your
deed, my lady love.

Farewell to you, my lady love, farewell, mistress, on account of your deed,
my lady love.

Or this one :

She pretends to be indifferent, not to love me, my true love, my dear
My dear, you go too far, your good name is going down, my dear.
Friends, do not let us listen any longer to love songs that are sung by those
who are out of sight.

Friends, it might be well if I took a new true love, a dear one
I hope she will hear my love song when I cry to my new love, my dear one.

It is evident that grief turns easily into shame, but grief
nevertheless in certain limited situations is allowed expression.
In the intimacies of Kwakiutl family life, also, there is oppor-
tunity for the expression of warm affection and the easy give-

174 PATTERNS OF CULTURE

and-take of cheerful human relations. Not all situations in
Kwakiutl existence require equally the motives that are most
characteristic of their lives.

In Western civilization, as in Kwakiutl life, not all aspects of
life serve equally the will to power which is so conspicuous in
modern life. In Dobu and Zuhi, however, it is not so easy to
see what aspects of life are touched lightly by their configura-
tions. This may be due to the nature of the cultural pattern,
or It may be due to a genius for consistency. At the present
time it is not possible to decide.

There is a sociological fact that must be taken into account
in any understanding of cultural integration. This is the sig-
nificance of diffusion. A vast body of anthropological work has
been devoted to plumbing the facts of human imitativeness.
The extent of the primitive areas over which traits have diffused
IS one of the most startling facts of anthropology. Traits of
costume, of techniques, of a ceremonial, of mythology, of economic
exchange at marriage, are spread over whole continents, and
every tribe on one continent will often possess the trait in some
form. Nevertheless, certain regions in these great areas have
impressed distinctive goals and motivations upon this raw material.
The Pueblos use the methods of agriculture, the magic devices,
the widespread myths that belong to great sections of North
America. An Apollonian culture on another continent would
necessarily work with other raw material. The two cultures
would have in common the direction in which they had modified
the raw material that was available on each continent, but the
available traits would be dissimilar. Comparable configurations
in different parts of the world will therefore inevitably have
different content. We can understand the direction in which
Pueblo culture has moved by comparing it with other North
American cultures, those which share the same elements but
which use them in a different fashion. In a similar way we
can best understand the Apollonian stress in Greek civilization
by studying it m its local setting among the cultures of the
eastern Mediterranean. Any clear understanding of the pro-
cesses of cultural integration must take its point of departure
from a knowledge of the facts of diffusion.

A recognition of these processes of integration, on the other
hand, gives a quite different picture of the nature of widespread
traits. The usual topical studies of marriage, or of initiation, or
of religion, assume that each trait is a special area of behaviour

THE NATURE OF SOCIETY 1 75

which has generated its own motivations. Westermarck explains
marriage as a situation of sex preference, and the usual inter-
pretation of initiation procedures is that they are the result of
puberty upheavals. Therefore all their thousand modifications
are facts in a single series, and only ring the changes upon some
one impulse or necessity that is implicit in the generic situation.

Very few cultures handle their great occasions m any such
simple fashion. These occasions, whether of marriage or death
or the invocation of the supernatural, are situations that each
society seizes upon to express its characteristic purposes. The
motivations that dominate it do not come into existence in the
particular selected situation, but are impressed upon it by the
general character of the culture. Marriage may have no reference
to mating preferences, which are provided for m other ways,
but accumulation of wives may be the current version of the
accumulation of wealth. Economic practices may^ depart so far
from their primary role of providing necessanes of food and
clothing that all agricultural techniques may be directed towards
piling up in lavish display many times the necessary food supply
of the people and allowing it to rot ostentatiously for pride’s sake.

The difficulty of understanding from the nature of the
occasion even comparatively simple cultural responses has been
clear over and over again in the descnption of the three cultures
we have selected. Mourning, in terms of its occasion, is a grief
or relief reaction to a loss situation. It happens that no one of
the three cultures makes this type of response to its mourning
institutions. The Pueblos come closest in that their rites treat
the death of a relative as one of the important emergencies when
society marshals its forces to put discomfort out of the way.
Though grief is hardly institutionalized in their procedures, they
recognize the loss situation as an emergency which it is necessary
to minimize. Among the Kwakiutl, regardless of whether or
not there may also be genuine sorrow, mourning institutions
are special instances of a cultural paranoia according to which
they regard themselves as shamed by the death of their relatives
and rouse themselves to get even. In Dobu the mourning
institutions have much in common, but primarily they are
punishments inflicted by the blood kin upon the spouse for
having caused the death of one of their number. That is, the
mourning institutions are again one of numberless occasions
which Dobu interprets as treachery, and handles by selecting a
victim whom it may punish.

PATTERNS OF CULTURE

176

It is an extraordinarily simple matter for tradition to take
any occasion that the environment or the life-cycle provides and
use it to channel purposes generically unrelated. The particular
character of the event may figure so slightly that the death of a
child from mumps involves the killing of a completely unim-
plicated person. Or a girl’s first menstruation involves the redis-
tribution of practically all the property of a tribe. Mourning,
or marriage, or puberty rites, or economics are not special items
of human behaviour, each with their own generic drives and
motivations which have determined their past history and will
determine their future, but certain occasions which any society
may seize upon to express its important cultural intentions.

The significant sociological unit, from this point of view,
therefore, is not the institution but the cultural configuration.
The studies of the family, of primitive economics, or of moral
ideas need to be broken up into studies that emphasize the
different configurations that in instance after instance have
dominated these traits. The peculiar nature of Kwakiutl life
can never be clear in a discussion which singles out the family for
discussion and derives Kwakiutl behaviour at marriage from the
marriage situation. Similarly, marriage in our own civilization
is a situation which can never be made clear as a mere variant on
mating and domesticity. Without the clue that in our civiliza-
tion at large man’s paramount aim is to amass private possessions
and multiply occasions of display, the modern position of the
wife and the modern emotions of jealousy are alike unintelligible.
Our attitudes towards our children are equally evidences of this
same cultural goal. Our children are not individuals whose
rights and tastes are casually respected from infancy, as they
are in some primitive societies, but special responsibilities, like
our possessions, to which we succumb or in which we glory, as
the case may be. They are fundamentally extensions of our
own egos and give a special opportunity for the display of
authority. The pattern is not inherent in the parent-children
situation, as we so glibly assume. It is impressed upon the
situation by the major drives of our culture, and it is only one
of the occasions in which we follow our traditional obsessions.

As we become increasingly culture-conscious, we shall be
able to isolate the tiny core that is generic in a situation and
the vast accretions that are local and cultural and man-made.
The fact that these accretions are not inevitable consequences of
the situation as such does not make them easier to change or

THE NATURE OF SOCIETY 1 77

less important in our behaviour. Indeed they are probably
harder to change than we have realized. Detailed changes in
the mother’s nursery behaviour, for instance, may well be in-
adequate to save a neurotic child when he is trapped in a repug-
nant situation which is reinforced by every contact he makes
and which will extend past his mother to his school and his
business and his wife. The whole course of life which is pre-
sented to him emphasizes rivalry and ownership. Probably the
child’s way out lies through luck or detachment. In any case,
the solution of the problem might well place less emphasis upon
the difficulties inherent in the parent-child situation and more
upon the forms taken in Western behaviour by ego-extension
and the exploiting of personal relations.

The problem of social value is intimately involved in the
fact of the different patternings of cultures. Discussions of social
value have usually been content to characterize certain human
traits as desirable and to indicate a social goal that would involve
these virtues. Certainly, it is said, exploitation of others in
personal relations and overweening claims of the ego are bad
whereas absorption in group activities is good ; a temper is
good that seeks satisfaction neither in sadism nor in masochism
and is willing to let and let live. A social order, however, which
like Zuni standardizes this good ” is far from Utopian. It
manifests likewise the defects of its virtues. It has no place, for
instance, for dispositions we are accustomed to value highly, such
as force of will or personal initiative or the disposition to take
up arms against a sea of troubles. It is incorrigibly mild. The
group activity that fills existence in Zuhi is out of touch with
human life — ^with birth, love, death, success, failure, and prestige.
A ritual pageant serves their purpose and minimizes more human
interests. The freedom from any forms of social exploitation or
of social sadism appears on the other side of the coin as endless
ceremonialism not designed to serve major ends of human
existence. It is the old inescapable fact that every upper has its
lower, every right side its left.

The complexity of the problem of social values is exceptionally
clear in Kwakiutl culture. The chief motive that the institutions
of the Kwakiutl rely upon and which they share in great measure
with modem society is the motive of rivalry. Rivalry is a struggle
that is not centred upon the real objects of the activity but
upon outdoing a competitor. The attention is no longer directed
towards providing adequately for a family or towards owning

178 PATTERNS OF CULTURE

goods that can be utilized or enjoyed, but towards outdistancing
one’s neighbours and owning more than anyone else. Every-
thing else IS lost sight of in the one great aim of victory. Rivalry
does not, like competition, keep its eyes upon the original activity ;
whether making a basket or selling shoes, it creates an artificial
situation : the game of showing that one can win out over
others.

Rivalry is notoriously wasteful. It ranks low in the scale of
human values. It is a tyranny from which, once it is encouraged
in any culture, no man may free himself. The wish for superiority
is gargantuan ; it can never be satisfied. The contest goes on
for ever. The more goods the community accumulates, the
greater the counters with which men play, but the game is as
far from being won as it was when the stakes were small. In
Kwakiutl institutions, such rivalry reaches its final absurdity in
equating investment with wholesale destruction of goods. They
contest for superiority chiefly in accumulation of goods, but often
also, and without a consciousness of the contrast, in breaking
in pieces their highest units of value, their coppers, and in
mating bonfires of their house-planks, their blankets and canoes.
The social waste is obvious. It is just as obvious in the obsessive
rivalry of Middletown where houses are built and clothing bought
and entertainments attended that each family may prove that
it has not been left out of the game.

It is an unattractive picture. In Kwakiutl life the rivalry is
carried out in such a way that all success must be built upon
the ruin of rivals ; in Middletown in such a way that individual
choices and direct satisfactions are reduced to a minimum and
conformity is sought beyond all other human gratifications. In
both cases it is clear that wealth is not sought and valued for
its direct satisfaction of human needs but as a series of counters
in the game of rivalry. If the will to victory were eliminated
from the economic life, as it is in Zuni, distribution and con-
sumption of wealth would follow quite different ‘‘ laws

Nevertheless, as we can see in Kwakiutl society and in the
rugged individualism of American pioneer life, the pursuit of
victory can give vigour and zest to human existence, Kwakiutl
life IS rich and forceful in its own terms. Its chosen goal has its
appropriate virtues, and social values in Kwakiutl civilization
are even more inextricably mixed than they are in Zuni. What-
ever the social orientation, a society which exemplifies it vigorously
will develop certain virtues that are natural to the goals it has

THE NATURE OF SOCIETY

179

chosen, and it is most unlikely that even the best society will
be able to stress in one social order all the virtues we prize in
human hfe. Utopia cannot be achieved as a final and perfect
structure within which human life will reach a faultless flowering
Utopias of this sort should be recognized as pure day-dreaming.
Real improvements in the social order depend upon more modest
and more difficult discriminations. It is possible to scrutinize
different institutions and cast up their cost in terms of social
capital, in terms of the less desirable behaviour traits they stimu-
late, and in terms of human suffering and frustration. If any
society wishes to pay that cost for its chosen and congenial
traits, certain values will develop within this pattern, however
“ bad ” it may be. But the risk is great, and the social order
may not be able to pay the price. It may break down beneath
them with all the consequent wanton waste of revolution and
economic and emotional disaster. In modem society this prob-
lem is the most pressing this generation has to face, and those
who are obsessed with it too often imagine that an economic
reorganization will give the world a Utopia out of their day-
dreams, forgetting that no social order can separate its virtues
from the defects of its virtues. There is no royal road to a
real Utopia.

There is, however, one difficult exercise to which we may
accustom ourselves as we become increasingly culture-conscious.
We may train ourselves to pass judgment upon the dominant
traits of our own civihzation. It is difficult enough for anyone
brought up under their power to recogmze them. It is still
more difficult to discount, upon necessity, our predilection for
them. They are as familiar as an old loved homestead. Any
world in which they do not appear seems to us cheerless and
untenable. Yet it is these very traits which by the operation of
a fundamental cultural process are most often carried to extremes.
They overreach themselves, and more than any other traits
they are likely to get out of hand. Just at the very point where
there is greatest hkehhood of the need of criticism, we are bound
to be least critical. Revision comes, but it comes by way of
revolution or of breakdown. The possibihty of orderly progress
is shut off because the generation in question could not make
any appraisal of its overgrown institutions. It could ^ not cast
them up in terms of profit and loss because it had lost its power
to look at them objectively. The situation had to reach a
breaking-point before relief was possible.

i8o

PATTERNS OF CULTURE

Appraisal of our own dominant traits has so far waited till
the trait in question was no longer a living issue. Religion
was not objectively discussed till it was no longer the cultural
trait to which our civilization was most deeply committed. Now
for the first time the comparative study of religions is free to
pursue any point at issue. It is not yet possible to discuss
capitalism, in the same way, and during wartime, warfare and
the problems of international relations are similarly tabu. Yet
the dominant traits of our civilization need special scrutiny.
We need to realize that they are compulsive, not in proportion
as they are basic and essential in human behaviour, but rather
in the degree to which they are local and overgrown in our
own culture. The one way of life which the Dobuan regards
as basic in human nature is one that is fundamentally treacherous
and safeguarded with morbid fears. The Kwakiutl similarly
cannot see life except as a series of rivalry situations, wherein
success is measured by the humiliation of one’s fellows. Their
belief is based on the importance of these modes of life in their
civilizations. But the importance of an institution in a culture
gives no direct indication of its usefulness or its inevitability.
The argument is suspect, and any cultural control which we
may be able to exercise will depend upon the degree to which
we can evaluate objectively the favoured and passionately fostered
traits of our Western civilization.

Chapter VIII

THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE PATTERN OF
CULTURE

The large corporate behaviour we have discussed is never-
theless the behaviour of individuals. It is the world with which
each person is severally presented, the world from which he
must make his individual life. Accounts of any civilization
condensed into a few dozen pages must necessarily throw into
relief the group standards and describe individual behaviour
as it exemplifies the motivations of that culture. The exigencies
of the situation are misleading only when this necessity is read
off as implying that he is submerged in an overpowering
ocean.

There is no proper antagonism between the role of society
and that of the individual. One of the most misleading mis-
conceptions due to this nineteenth-century dualism was the idea
that what was subtracted from society was added to the individual
and what was subtracted from the individual was added to
society. Philosophies of freedom, political creeds of laissez fatre,
revolutions that have unseated dynasties, have been built on
this dualism. The quarrel in anthropological theory between
the importance of the culture pattern and of the individual
is only a small ripple from this fundamental conception of the
nature of society.

In reality, society and the individual are not antagonists.
His culture provides the raw material of which the individual
makes his life. If it is meagre, the individual suffers ; if it
is rich, the individual has the chance to nse to his opportunity.
Every private interest of every man and woman is served by
the enrichment of the traditional stores of his civilization. The
richest musical sensitivity can operate only within the equipment
and standards of its tradition. It will add, perhaps importantly,
to that tradition, but its achievement remains in proportion to
the instruments and musical theory which the culture has pro-
vided. In the same fashion a talent for observation expends
itself in some Melanesian tribe upon the negligible borders of
the magico-religious field. For a realization of its potentialities
it is dependent upon the development of scientific methodology,

G i8i

PATTERNS OF CULTURE

182

and it has no fruition unless the culture has elaborated the
necessary concepts and tools.

The man in the street still thinks in terms of a necessary
antagonism between society and the individual. In large
measure this is because in our civilization the regulative activities
of society are singled out, and we tend to identify society with
the restrictions the law imposes upon us. The law lays down
the number of miles per hour that I may drive an automobile.
If It takes this restriction away, I am by that much the freer.
This basis for a fundamental antagonism between society and
the individual is naive indeed when it is extended as a basic
philosophical and political notion. Society is only incidentally
and in certain situations regulative, and law is not equivalent
to the social order. In the simpler homogeneous cultures col-
lective habit or custom may quite supersede the necessity for
any development of formal legal authority. American Indians
sometimes say : “In the old days, there were no fights about
hunting grounds or fishing territories. There was no law then,
so everybody did what was right/’ The phrasing makes it clear
that in their old life they did not think of themselves as sub-
mitting to a social control imposed upon them from without.
Even in our civilization the law is never more than a crude
implement of society, and one it is often enough necessary to
check in its arrogant career. It is never to be read off as if
it were the equivalent of the social order.

Society in its full sense as we have discussed it in this volume
IS never an entity separable from the individuals who compose
it. No individual can arrive even at the threshold of his poten-
tialities without a culture in which he participates. Conversely,
no civilization has in it any element which in the last analysis
is not the contribution of an individual. Where else could any
trait come from except from the behaviour of a man or a woman
or a child ?

It is largely because of the traditional acceptance of a con-
flict between society and the individual, that emphasis upon
cultural behaviour is so often interpreted as a denial of the
autonomy of the individual. The reading of Sumner’s Folkways
usually rouses a protest at the limitations such an interpretation
places upon the scope and initiative of the individual. Anthropo-
logy is often believed to be a counsel of despair which makes
untenable a beneficent human illusion. But no anthropologist
with a background of experience of other cultures has ever

THE INDIVIDUAL AND CULTURE

183

believed that individuals were automatons, mechanically carrying
out the decrees of their civilization. No culture yet observed
has been able to eradicate the differences in the temperaments
of the persons who compose it. It is always a give-and-take.
The problem of the individual is not clarified by stressing the
antagonism between culture and the individual, but by stressing
their mutual reinforcement. This rapport is so close that it is
not possible to discuss patterns of culture without considering
specifically their relation to individual psychology.

We have seen that any society selects some segment of the
arc of possible human behaviour, and in so far as it achieves
integration its institutions tend to further the expression of its
selected segment and to inhibit opposite expressions. But these
opposite expressions are the congenial responses, nevertheless, of
a certain proportion of the earners of that culture. We have
already discussed the reasons for believing that this selection is
pnmarily cultural and not biological. We cannot, therefore,
even on theoretical grounds, imagine that all the congenial
responses of all its people will be equally served by the institutions
of any culture. To understand the behaviour of the individual,
it is not merely necessary to relate his personal life-history to
his endowments, and to measure these against an arbitrarily
selected normality. It is necessary also to relate his congenial
responses to the behaviour that is singled out in the institutions
of his culture.

The vast proportion of all individuals who are born into
any society always and whatever the idiosyncrasies of its institu-
tions, assume, as we have seen, the behaviour dictated by that
society. This fact is always interpreted by the carriers of that
culture as being due to the fact that their particular institutions
reflect an ultimate and umversal sanity. The actual reason is
quite different. Most people are shaped to the form of the
culture because of the enormous malleability of their original
endowment. They are plastic to the moulding force of the
society into which they are born. It does not matter whether,
with the North-West Coast, it requires delusions of self-reference,
or with our own civilization the amassing of possessions. In
any case the great mass of individuals take quite readily the
form that is presented to them.

They do not all, however, find it equally congenial, and
those are favoured and fortunate whose potentialities most nearly
coincide with the type of behaviour selected by their society.

184 PATTERNS OF CULTURE

Those who, in a situation in which they are frustrated, naturally
seek ways of putting the occasion out of sight as expeditiously
as possible are well served in Pueblo culture. South-West
institutions, as we have seen, minimize the situations in which
serious frustration can arise, and when it cannot be avoided,
as in death, they provide means to put it behind them with
all speed.

C3n the other hand, those who react to frustration as to
an insult and whose first thought is to get even are amply pro-
vided for on the North-West Coast. They may extend their
native reaction to situations in which their paddle breaks or
their canoe overturns or to the loss of relatives by death. They
rise from their first reaction of sulking to thrust back in return,
to fight ’’ with property or with weapons. Those who can
assuage despair by the act of bringing shame to others can
register freely and without conflict in this society, because their
proclivities are deeply channelled in their culture. In Dobu
those whose first impulse is to select a victim and project their
misery upon him in procedures of punishment are equally
fortunate.

It happens that none of the three cultures we have described
meets frustration in a realistic manner by stressing the resumption
of the original and interrupted experience. It might even seem
that in the case of death this is impossible. But the institutions
of many cultures nevertheless attempt nothing less. Some of
the forms the restitution takes are repugnant to us, but that
only makes it clearer that in cultures where frustration is handled
by giving rein to this potential behaviour, the institutions of
that society carry this course to extraordinary lengths. Among
the Eskimo, when one man has killed another, the family of
the man who has been murdered may take the murderer to
replace the loss within its own group. The murderer then
becomes the husband of the woman who has been widowed
by his act. This is an emphasis upon restitution that ignores
all other aspects of the situation — those which seem to us the
only important ones ; but when tradition selects some such
objective it is quite in character that it should disregard all else.

Restitution may be carried out in mourning situations in
ways that are less uncongenial to the standards of Western
civilization. Among certain of the Central Algonkian Indians
south of the Great Lakes the usual procedure was adoption.
Upon the death of a child a similar child was put into his place.

THE INDIVIDUAL AND CULTURE 1 85

This similarity was determined in all sorts of ways : often a
captive brought in from a raid was taken into the family in the
full sense and given all the privileges and the tenderness that
had originally been given to the dead child. Or quite as often
it was the child’s closest playmate, or a child from another
related settlement who resembled the dead child in height and
features. In such cases the family from which the child was
chosen was supposed to be pleased, and indeed in most cases
it was. by no means the great step that it would be under our
institutions. The child had always recognized many mothers ”
and many homes where he was on familiar footing. The new
allegiance made him thoroughly at home in still another house-
hold. From the point of view of the bereaved parents, the
situation had been met by a restitution of the statiis quo that
existed before the death of their child.

Persons who primarily mourn the situation rather than the
lost individual are provided for in these cultures to a degree
which is unimaginable under our institutions. We recognize
the possibility of such solace, but we are careful to minimize its
connection with the original loss. We do not use it as a mourning
technique, and individuals who would be well satisfied with such
a solution are left unsupported until the difficult crisis is past.

There is another possible attitude towards frustration. It
is the precise opposite of the Pueblo attitude, and we have
described it among the other Dionysian reactions of the Plains
Indians. Instead of trying to get past the experience with the
least possible discomfiture, it finds relief in the most extravagant
expression of grief. The Indians of the plains capitalized the
utmost indulgences and exacted violent demonstrations of emotion
as a matter of course.

In any group of individuals we can recognize those to whom
these different reactions to frustration and grief are congenial :
ignoring it, indulging it by uninhibited expression, getting even,
punishing a victim, and seeking restitution of the original situa-
tion. In the psychiatric records of our own society, some of
these impulses are recognized as bad ways of dealing with the
situation, some as good. The bad ones are said to lead to
maladjustments and insanities, the good ones to adequate social
functioning. It is clear, however, that the correlation does not
lie between any one bad ” tendency and abnormality in any
absolute sense. The desire to run away from grief, to leave
it behind at all costs, does not foster psychotic behaviour where,

PATTERNS OF CULTURE

1 86

as among the Pueblos, it is mapped out by institutions and
supported by every attitude of the group. The Pueblos are not
a neurotic people. Their culture gives the impression of foster-
ing mental health. Similarly, the paranoid attitudes so violently
expressed among the Kwakiutl are known in psychiatric theory
derived from our own civilization as thoroughly “ bad ’’ ; that
is, they lead in various ways to the breakdown of personality.
But it is just those individuals among the Kwakiutl who find
it congenial to give the freest expression to these attitudes who
nevertheless are the leaders of Kwakiutl society and find greatest
personal fulfilment in its culture.

Obviously, adequate personal adjustment does not depend
upon following certain motivations and eschewing others. The
correlation is in a different direction. Just as those are favoured
whose congenial responses are closest to that behaviour which
characterizes their society, so those are disoriented whose con-
genial responses fall in that arc of behaviour which is not capi-
talized by their culture. These abnormals are those who are
not supported by the institutions of their civilization. They
are the exceptions who have not easily taken the traditional
forms of their culture.

For a valid comparative psychiatry, these disoriented persons
who have failed to adapt themselves adequately to their cultures
are of first importance. The issue in psychiatry has been too
often confused by starting from a fixed list of symptoms instead
of from the study of those whose characteristic reactions are
denied validity m their society.

The tribes we have described have all of them their non-
participating abnormal ’’ individuals. The individual in Dobu
who was thoroughly disoriented was the man who was naturally
friendly and found activity an end in itself. He was a pleasant
fellow who did not seek to overthrow his fellows or to punish
them. He worked for anyone who asked him, and he was tireless
in carrying out their commands. He was not filled by a terror
of the dark like his fellows, and he did not, as they did, utterly
inhibit simple public responses of friendliness towards women
closely related, like a wife or sister. He often patted them play-
fully in public. In any other Dobuan this was scandalous
behaviour, but m him it was regarded as merely silly. The
village treated him in a kindly enough fashion, not taking
advantage of him or making a sport of ridiculing him, but he
was definitely regarded as one who was outside the game.

THE INDIVIDUAL AND CULTURE 1 87

The behaviour congenial to the Dobuan simpleton has been
made the ideal in certain periods of our own civilization, and
there are still vocations in which his responses are accepted in
most Western communities. Especially if a woman is in ques-
tion, she is well provided for even to-day in our mores^ and
functions honourably in her family and community. The fact
that the Dobuan could not function in his culture was not a
consequence of the particular responses that were congenial to
him, but of the chasm between them and the cultural pattern.

Most ethnologists have had similar experiences in recognizing
that the persons who are put outside the pale of society with
contempt are not those who would be placed there by another
culture. Lowie found among the Crow Indians of the plains
a man of exceptional knowledge of his cultural forms. He was
interested in considering these objectively and in correlating
different facets. He had an interest in genealogical facts and
was invaluable on points of history. Altogether he was an ideal
interpreter of Crow life. These traits, however, were not those
which were the password to honour among the Crow. He had
a definite shrinking from physical danger, and bravado was
the tribal virtue. To make matters worse he had attempted
to gain recognition by claiming a war honour which was fraudu-
lent. He was proved not to have brought in, as he claimed, a
picketed horse from the enemy’s camp. To lay false claim to
war honours was a paramount sin among the Crow, and by
the general opinion, constantly reiterated, he was regarded as
irresponsible and incompetent.

Such situations can be paralleled with the attitude in our
civilization towards a man who does not succeed in regarding
personal possessions as supremely important. Our hobo popu-
lation is constantly fed by those to whom the accumulation of
property is not a sufficient motivation. In case these individuals
ally themselves with the hoboes, public opinion regards them^ as
potentially vicious, as indeed because of the asocial situation
into which they are thrust they readily become. In case, how-
ever, these men compensate by emphasizing their artistic tempera-
ment and become members of expatriated groups of petty artists,
opinion regards them not as vicious but as silly. ^ In any case
they are unsupported by the forms of their society, and the
effort to express themselves satisfactorily is ordinarily a greater
task than they can achieve.

The dilemma of such an individual is often most successfully

1 88

PATTERNS OF CULTURE

solved by doing violence to his strongest natural impulses and
accepting the role the culture honours. In case he is a person
to whom social recognition is necessary, it is ordinarily his only
possible course. One of the most striking individuals in Zuni
had accepted this necessity. In a society that thoroughly distrusts
authority of any sort, he had a native personal magnetism that
singled him out in any group. In a society that exalts modera-
tion and the easiest way, he was turbulent and could act violently
upon occasion. In a society that praises a pliant personality
that talks lots — that is, that chatters in a friendly fashion —
he was scornful and aloof. Zuhi’s only reaction to such person-
alities is to brand them as witches. He was said to have been
seen peering through a window from outside, and this is a
sure mark of a witch. At any rate, he got drunk one day and
boasted that they could not kill him. He was taken before
the war priests who hung him by his thumbs from the rafters
till he should confess to his witchcraft. This is the usual pro-
cedure in a charge of witchcraft. However, he dispatched a
messenger to the government troops. When they came, his
shoulders were already crippled for life, and the officer of the
law was left with no recourse but to imprison the war priests
who had been responsible for the enormity. One of these war
priests was probably the most respected and important person
in recent Zuni history, and when he returned after imprisonment
in the state penitentiary he never resumed his priestly offices.
He regarded his power as broken. It was a revenge that is prob-
ably unique in Zuhi history. It involved, of course, a challenge
to the priesthoods, against whom the witch by his act openly
aligned himself.

The course of his life in the forty years that followed this
defiance was not, however, what we might easily predict. A
witch is not barred from his membership in cult groups because
he has been condemned, and the way to recognition lay through
such activity. He possessed a remarkable verbal memory and a
sweet singing voice. He learned unbehevable stores of mytho-
logy, of esoteric ritual, of cult songs. Many hundreds of pages
of stories and ritual poetry were taken down from his dictation
before he died, and he regarded his songs as much more exten-
sive. He became indispensable in ceremonial life and before
he died was the governor of Zuni. The congenial bent of his
personality threw him into irreconcilable conflict with his society,
and he solved his dilemma by turning an incidental talent to

THE INDIVIDUAL AND CULTURE 1 89

account. As we might well expect, he was not a happy man.
As governor of Zum, and high in his cult groups, a marked
man in his community, he was obsessed by death. He was a
cheated man in the midst of a mildly happy populace.

It IS easy to imagine the life he might have lived among
the Plains Indians, where every institution favoured the traits
that were native to him. The personal authority, the turbulence,
the scorn, would all have been honoured in the career he could
have made his own. The unhappiness that was inseparable
from his temperament as a successful priest and governor of
Zuhi would have had no place as a war chief of the Cheyenne ;
It was not a function of the traits of his native endowment but
of the standards of the culture in which he found no outlet for
his native responses.

The individuals we have so far discussed are not in any sense
psychopathic. They illustrate the dilemma of the individual
whose congenial drives are not provided for in the institutions
of his culture. This dilemma becomes of psychiatric importance
when the behaviour in question is regarded as categorically
abnormal in a society. Western civilization tends to regard
even a mild homosexual as an abnormal. The clinical picture
of homosexuality stresses the neuroses and psychoses to which
It gives rise, and emphasizes almost equally the inadequate
functioning of the invert and his behaviour. We have only
to turn to other cultures, however, to realize that homosexuals
have by no means been uniformly inadequate to the social
situation. They have not always failed to function. In some
societies they have even been especially acclaimed. Plato’s
Republic is, of course, the most convincing statement of the
honourable estate of homosexuality. It is presented as a major
means to the good life, and Plato’s high ethical evaluation of
this response was upheld in the customary behaviour of Greece
at that period.

The American Indians do not make Plato’s high moral
claims for homosexuality, but homosexuals are often regarded
as exceptionally able. In most of North America there exists
the institution of the berdache^ as the French called them. These
men-women were men who at puberty or thereafter took the
dress and the occupations of women. Sometimes they married
other men and lived with them. Sometimes they were men
with no inversion, persons of weak sexual endowment who chose
this role to avoid the jeers of the women. The berdaches were

PATTERNS OF CULTURE

190

never regarded as of first-rate supernatural power, as similar
men-women were m Sibena, but rather as leaders m women’s
occupations, good healers in certain diseases, or, among certain
tribes, as the genial organizers of social affairs. They were
usually, in spite of the manner in which they were accepted,
regarded with a certain embarrassment. It was thought slightly
ridiculous to address as ‘‘ she ” a person who was known to
be a man and who, as in Zuni, would be buried on the men’s
side of the cemetery. But they were socially placed. The
emphasis in most tribes was upon the fact that men who took
over women’s occupations excelled by reason of their strength
and initiative and were therefore leaders in women’s techniques
and in the accumulation of those forms of property made by
women. One of the best known of all the Zunis of a generation
ago was the man- woman We-wha, who was, in the words of
his friend, Mrs. Stevenson, certainly the strongest person in
Zuni, both mentally and physically ”. His remarkable memory
for ritual made him a chief personage on ceremonial occasions,
and his strength and intelligence made him a leader in all kinds
of crafts.

The men-women of Zuni are not all strong, self-reliant per-
sonages. Some of them take this refuge to protect themselves
against their inability to take part in men’s activities. One
is almost a simpleton, and one, hardly more than a little boy,
has delicate features like a girl’s. There are obviously several
reasons why a person becomes a berdache in Zuni, but whatever
the reason, men who have chosen openly to assume women’s
dress have the same chance as any other persons to establish
themselves as functioning members of the society. Their response
is socially recognized. If they have native ability, they can
give it scope ; if they are weak creatures, they fail in terms of
their weakness of character, not in terms of their inversion.

The Indian institution of the berdache was most strongly
developed on the plains. The Dakota had a saying, “ fine
possessions like a herdachis ”, and it was the epitome of praise
for any woman’s household possessions. A berdache had two
strings to his bow, he was supreme in women’s techniques, and
he could also support his menage by the man’s activity of hunting.
Therefore no one was richer. When especially fine beadwork or
dressed skins were desired for ceremonial occasions, the berdache^ s
work was sought in preference to any other’s. It was his social
adequacy that was stressed above all else. As in Zuni, the

THE INDIVIDUAL AND CULTURE I9I

attitude towards him is ambivalent and touched with malaise
in the face of a recognized incongruity. Social scorn, however,
was visited not upon the berdache but upon the man who lived
with him. The latter was regarded as a weak man who had
chosen an easy berth instead of the recognized goals of their
culture ; he did not contribute to the household, which was
already a model for all households through the sole efforts of
the berdache. His sexual adjustment was not singled out m
the judgment that was passed upon him, but in terms of his
economic adjustment he was an outcast.

When the homosexual response is regarded as a perversion,
however, the invert is immediately exposed to all the conflicts
to which aberrants are always exposed. His guilt, his sense of
inadequacy, his failures, are consequences of the disrepute which
social tradition visits upon him, and few people can achieve a
satisfactory life unsupported by the standards of their society.
The adjustments that society demands of them would strain any
man’s vitality, and the consequences of this conflict we identify
with their homosexuality.

Trance is a similar abnormality in our society. Even a
very mild mystic is aberrant in Western civilization. In order
to study trance or catalepsy within our own social groups, we
have to go to the case histories of the abnormal Therefore
the correlation between trance experience and the neurotic and
psychotic seems perfect. As in the case of the homosexual,
however, it is a local correlation characteristic of our century.
Even in our own cultural background other eras give different
results. In the Middle Ages when Catholicism made the ecstatic
experience the mark of sainthood, the trance experience was
greatly valued, and those to whom the response was congenial,
instead of being overwhelmed by a catastrophe as in our cen-
tury, were given confidence in the pursuit of their careers. ^ It
was a validation of ambitions, not a stigma of insanity. Indivi-
duals who were susceptible to trance, therefore, succeeded or
failed in terms of their native capacities, but since trance experi-
ence was highly valued, a great leader was very likely to be
capable of it.

Among primitive peoples, trance and catalepsy have been
honoured in the extreme. Some of the Indian tribes of California
accorded prestige principally to those who passed through certain
trance experiences. Not all of these tribes believed that it was
exclusively women who were so blessed, but among the Shasta

192 PATTERNS OF CULTURE

this was the convention. Their shamans were women, and
they were accorded the greatest prestige m the community. They
were chosen because of their constitutional liability to trance
and allied manifestations. One day the woman who was so
destined, while she was about her usual work, fell suddenly
to the ground. She had heard a voice speaking to her in tones
of the greatest intensity. Turning, she had seen a man with
drawn bow and arrow. He commanded her to sing on pam
of being shot through the heart by his arrow, but under the
stress of the experience she fell senseless. Her family gathered.
She was lying rigid, hardly breathing. They knew that for
some time she had had dreams of a special character which
indicated a shamamstic calling, dreams of escaping grizzly bears,
falling off cliffs or trees, or of being surrounded by swarms of
yellow-jackets. The community knew therefore what to expect.
After a few hours the woman began to moan gently and to
roll about upon the ground, trembling violently. She was sup-
posed to be repeating the song which she had been told to
sing and which during the trance had been taught her by the
spirit. As she revived, her moaning became more and more
clearly the spirit’s song, until at last she called out the name of
the spirit Itself, and immediately blood oozed from her mouth.

When the woman had come to herself after the first encounter
with her spirit, she danced that night her first initiatory shaman’s
dance. For three nights she danced, holding herself by a rope
that was swung from the ceiling. On the third night she had
to receive in her body her power from her spirit. She was
dancing, and as she felt the approach of the moment she called
out, “ He will shoot me, he will shoot me.” Her friends stood
close, for when she reeled in a kind of cataleptic seizure, they
had to seize her before she fell or she would die. From this
time on she had in her body a visible materialization of her
spirit’s power, an icicle-like object which in her dances thereafter
she would exhibit, producing it from one part of her body and
returning it to another part. From this time on she continued
to validate her supernatural power by further cataleptic demons-
trations, and she was called upon in great emergencies of life and
death, for curing and for divination and for counsel. She
became, in other words, by this procedure a woman of great
power and importance.

It is clear that, far from regarding cataleptic seizures as
blots upon the family escutcheon and as evidences of dreaded

THE INDIVIDUAL AND CULTURE

193

disease, cultural approval had seized upon them and made of
them the pathway to authority over one’s fellows. They were
the outstanding characteristic of the most respected social type,
the type which functioned with most honour and reward in
the community. It was precisely the cataleptic individuals who
in this culture were singled out for authority and leadership.

The possible usefulness of '' abnormal ” types in a social
structure, provided they are types that are culturally selected
by that group, is illustrated from every part of the world. The
shamans of Siberia dominate their communities. According to
the ideas of these peoples, they are individuals who by sub-
mission to the will of the spirits have been cured of a grievous
illness — the onset of the seizures — and have acquired by this
means great supernatural power and incomparable vigour and
health. Some, during the period of the call, are violently insane
for several years ; others irresponsible to the point where they
have to be constantly watched lest they wander olf in the snow
and freeze to death ; others ill and emaciated to the point of
death, sometimes with bloody sweat. It is the shamanistic prac-
tice which constitutes their cure, and the extreme exertion of a
Siberian seance leaves them, they claim, rested and able to
enter immediately upon a similar performance. Cataleptic
seizures are regarded as an essential part of any shamanistic
performance.

A good description of the neurotic condition of the shaman
and the attention given him by his society is an old one by
Canon Callaway, recorded in the words of an old Zulu of South
Africa :

The condition of a man who is about to become a diviner is this ;
at first he is apparently robust, but in the process of time^ he begins
to be delicate, not having any real disease, but being delicate He
habitually avoids certain kinds of food, choosing what he likes, and
he does not eat much of that ; he is continually complaining of
pains in different parts of his body. And he tells them that he has
dreamt that he was carried away by a river. He dreams of many
things, and his body is muddied [as a river] and he becomes a house
of dreams. He dreams constantly of many things, and on awaking
tells his friends, “ My body is muddied to-day ; I dreamt many
men were killing me, and I escaped I know not how. On waking
one part of my body felt different from other parts ; it was no longer
alike all over.” At last that man is very ill, and they go to the diviners
to enquire.

The diviners do not at once see that he is about to have a soft
head [that is, the sensitivity associated with shamanism]. It is

PATTERNS OF CULTURE

194

difficult for them to see the truth ; they continually talk nonsense
and make false statements, until all the man’s cattle are devoured
at their command, they saying that the spirit of his people demands
cattle, that it may eat food. At length all the man’s property is
expended, he still being ill , and they no longer know what to do,
for he has no more cattle, and his friends help him in such things
as he needs

At length a diviner comes and says that all the others are wrong
He says, “ He is possessed by the spirits. There is nothing else.
They move in him, being divided into two parties ; some say, ‘ No,
we do not wish our child injured We do not wish it.’ It is for
that reason he does not get well If you bar the way against the
spirits, you will be killing him. For he will not be a diviner ; neither
will he ever be a man again.”

So the man may be ill two years without getting better ; perhaps
even longer than that. He is confined to his house This continues
till his hair falls off. And his body is dry and scurfy ; he does not
like to anoint himself. He shows that he is about to be a diviner
by yawning again and again, and by sneezing continually. It is
apparent also from his being very fond of snuff ; not allowing any
long time to pass without taking some. And people begin to see
that he has had what is good given to him

After that he is ill ; he has convulsions, and when water has
been poured on him they then cease for a time He habitually
sheds tears, at first slight, then at last he weeps aloud and when the
people are asleep he is heard making a noise and wakes the people
by his singing ; he has composed a song, and the men and women
awake and go to sing m concert with him All the people of the
village are troubled by want of sleep ; for a man who is becoming a
diviner causes great trouble, for he does not sleep, but works con-
stantly with his brain ; his sleep is merely by snatches, and he wakes
up singing many songs ; and people who are near quit their villages
by night when they hear him singing aloud and go to sing in concert.
Perhaps he sings till morning, no one having slept. And then he
leaps about the house like a frog ; and the house becomes too small
for him, and he goes out leaping and singing, and shaking like a
reed m the water, and dripping with perspiration.

In this state of things they daily expect his death ; he is now
but skin and bones, and they think that to-morrow’s sun will not
leave him alive. At this time many cattle are eaten, for the people
encourage his becoming a diviner. At length [in a dream] an ancient
ancestral spirit is pointed out to him. This spirit says to him, “ Go
to So-and-so and he will churn for you an emetic [the medicine the
drinking of which is a part of shamanistic initiation] that you may
be a diviner altogether.” Then he is quiet a few days, having gone
to the diviner to have the medicine churned for him ; and he comes
back quite another man, being now cleansed and a diviner indeed.

Thereafter for life, when he is possessed by his spirits, he foretells
events and finds lost articles.

THE INDIVIDUAL AND CULTURE

195

It IS clear that culture may value and make socially available
even highly unstable human types. If it chooses to treat their
peculiarities as the most valued variants of human behaviour,
the individuals in question will rise to the occasion and perform
their social roles without reference to our usual ideas of the
types who can make social adjustments and those who cannot.
Those who function inadequately in any society are not those
with certain fixed “ abnormal ” traits, but may well be those
whose responses have received no support in the institutions of
their culture. The weakness of these aberrants is in great
measure illusory. It springs, not from the fact that they are
lacking in necessary vigour, but that they are individuals whose
native responses are not reaffirmed by society. They are, as
Sapir phrases it, “ alienated from an impossible world ”.

The person unsupported by the standards of his time and
place and left naked to the winds of ridicule has been unforget-
tably drawn in European literature in the figure of Don Quixote.
Cervantes turned upon a tradition still honoured in the abstract
the limelight of a changed set of practical standards, and his
poor old man, the orthodox upholder of the romantic chivalry
of another generation, became a simpleton. The windmills with
which he tilted were the senous antagonists of a hardly vanished
world, but to tilt with them when the world no longer called
them serious was to rave. He loved his Dulcm^a in the best
traditional manner of chivalry, but another version of love was
fashionable for the moment, and his fervour was counted to him
for madness.

These contrasting worlds which, in the primitive cultures we
have considered, are separated from one another in space, in
modern Occidental history more often succeed one another in
time. The major issue is the same in either case, but the import-
ance of understanding the phenomenon is far greater in the
modern world where we cannot escape if we would from the
succession of configurations in time. When each culture is a
world in itself, relatively stable like the Eskimo culture, for
example, and geographically isolated from all others, the issue
is academic. But our civilization must deal with cultural
standards that go down under our eyes and new ones that arise
from a shadow upon the horizon. We must be willing to take
account of changing normalities even when the question is of
the morality in which we were bred. Just as we are handi-
capped in dealing with ethical problems so long as we hold

igS PATTERNS OF CULTURE

to an absolute definition of morality, so we are handicapped
in dealing with human society so long as we identify our local
normalities with the inevitable necessities of existence.

No society has yet attempted a self-conscious direction of
the process by which its new normalities are created in the next
generation. Dewey has pointed out how possible and yet how
drastic such social engineenng would be. For some traditional
arrangements it is obvious that very high prices are paid, reckoned
in terms of human suffering and frustration. If these arrange-
ments presented themselves to us merely as arrangements and
not as categorical imperatives, our reasonable course would be
to adapt them by whatever means to rationally selected goals.
What we do instead is to ridicule our Don Quixotes, the ludicrous
embodiments of an outmoded tradition, and continue to regard
our own as final and prescribed m the nature of things.

In the meantime the therapeutic problem of dealing with
our psychopaths of this type is often misunderstood. Their
alienation from the actual world can often be more intelligently
handled than by insisting that they adopt the modes that are
alien to them. Two other courses are always possible. In the
first place, the misfit individual may cultivate a greater objective
interest in his own preferences and learn how to manage with
greater equanimity his deviation from the type. If he learns
to recognize the extent to which his suffering has been due to
his lack of support in a traditional ethos, he may gradually
educate himself to accept his degree of difference with less
suffering. Both the exaggerated emotional disturbances of the
manic depressive and the seclusion of the schizophrenic add
certain values to existence which are not open to those dif-
ferently constituted. The unsupported individual who valiantly
accepts his favourite and native virtues may attain a feasible
course of behaviour that makes it unnecessary for him to take
refuge in a private world he has fashioned for himself. He
may gradually achieve a more independent and less tortured
attitude towards his deviations and upon this attitude he may
be able to build an adequately functioning existence.

In the second place, an increased tolerance in society towards
its less usual types must keep pace with the self-education of
the patient. The possibilities in this direction are endless.
Tradition is as neurotic as any patient ; its' overgrown fear
of deviation from its fortuitous standards conforms to all the
usual definitions of the psychopathic. This fear does not depend

THE INDIVIDUAL AND CULTURE

197

upon observation of the limits within which conformity is neces-
sary to the social good. Much more deviation is allowed to
the individual in some cultures than in others, and those in
which much is allowed cannot be shown to suffer from their
peculiarity. It is probable that social orders of the future will
carry this tolerance and encouragement of indhddual difference
much farther than any cultures of which we have experi-
ence.

The American tendency at the present time leans so far
to the opposite extreme that it is not easy for us to picture the
changes that such an attitude would bring about. Middletown
is a typical example of our usual urban fear of seeming in how-
ever slight an act different from our neighbours. Eccentricity
is more feared than parasitism. Every sacrifice of time and
tranquillity is made in order that no one in the family may have
any taint of lack of conformity attached to him. Children in school
make their great tragedies out of not wearing a certain kind
of stockings, not joining a certain dancing-class, not driving a
certain car. The fear of being different is the dominating
motivation recorded in Middletown.

The psychopathic toll that such a motivation extracts is
evident in every institution for mental diseases in our country.
In a society in which it existed only as a minor motive among
many others, the psychiatric picture would be a very different
one. At all events, there can be no reasonable doubt that one
of the most effective ways in which to deal with the staggering
burden of psychopathic tragedies in America at the present time
is by means of an educational programme which fosters tolerance
in society and a k ind of self-respect and independence that is
foreign to Middletown and our urban traditions.

Not all psychopaths, of course, are individuals, whose native
responses are at variance with those of their civilization. Another
large group are those who are merely inadequate and who are
strongly enough motivated for their failure to be more than
they can bear. In a society in which the will-to-power is most
highly rewarded, those who fail may not be those who are
differently constituted, but simply those who are insuflficiently
endowed. The inferiority complex takes a great toll of suffering
in our society. It is not necessary that sufferers of this t>^e
have a history of frustration in the sense that strong native
bents have been inhibited; their frustration is often enough
only the reflection of their inability to reach a certain goal.

198 PATTERNS OF CULTURE

There is a cultural implication here, too, in that the traditional
goal may be accessible to large numbers or to very few, and
m proportion as success is obsessive and is limited to the few, a
greater and greater number will be liable to the extreme penalties
of maladjustment.

To a certain extent, therefore, civilization in setting higher
and possibly more worth-while goals may increase the number
of its abnormals. But the point may very easily be over-
emphasized, for very small changes in social attitudes may far
outweigh this correlation. On the whole, since the social possi-
bilities of tolerance and recognition of individual difference are
so little explored in practice, pessimism seems premature. Cer-
tainly other quite different social factors which we have just
discussed are more directly responsible for the great proportion
of our neurotics and psychotics, and with these other factors
civilizations could, if they would, deal without necessary intrinsic
loss.

We have been considering individuals from the point of view
of their ability to function adequately in their society. This
adequate functioning is one of the ways m which normality is
clinically defined. It is also defined in terms of fixed symptoms,
and the tendency is to identify normality with the statistically
average. In practice this average is one arrived at in the labora-
tory, and deviations from it are defined as abnormal.

From the point of view of a single culture this procedure is
very useful. It shows the clinical picture of the civilization and
gives considerable information about its socially approved be-
haviour. To generalize this as an absolute normal, however,
is a different matter. As we have seen, the range of normality
in different cultures does not coincide. Some, like Zufii and the
Kwakiutl, are so far removed from each other that they overlap
only slightly. The statistically determined normal on the North-
West Coast would be far outside the extreme boundaries of
abnormality in the Pueblos. The normal Kwakiutl rivalry con-
test would only be understood as madness in Zuni, and the tradi-
tional Zuni indifference to dominance and the humiliation of
others would be the fatuousness of a simpleton in a man of
noble family on the North-West Coast. Aberrant behaviour in
either culture could never be determined in relation to any
least common denominator of behaviour. Any society, accord-
ing to its major preoccupations, may increase and intensify even
hysterical, epileptic, or paranoid symptoms, at the same time

THE INDIVIDUAL AND CULTURE 1 99

relying socially in a greater and greater degree upon the very
individuals who display them.

This fact is important in psychiatry because it makes clear
another group of abnormals which probably exists in every
culture : the abnormals who represent the extreme development
of the local cultural type. This group is socially in the opposite
situation from the group we have discussed, those whose responses
are at variance with their cultural standards. Society, instead
of exposing the former group at every point, supports them in
their farthest aberrations. They have a licence which they may
almost endlessly exploit. For this reason these persons almost
never fall within the scope of any contemporary psychiatry.
They are unlikely to be described even in the most careful
manuals of the generation that fosters them. Yet from the point
of view of another generation or culture they are ordinarily the
most bizarre of the psychopathic types of the period.

The Puritan divines of New England in the eighteenth century
were the last persons whom contemporary opinion in the colonies
regarded as psychopathic. Few prestige groups in any culture
have been allowed such complete intellectual and emotional
dictatorship as they were. They were the voice of God. Yet
to a modem observer it is they, not the confused and tormented
women they put to death as witches, who were the psycho-
neurotics of Puritan New England. A sense of guilt as extreme
as they portrayed and demanded both in their own conversion
experiences and in those of their converts is found in a slightly
saner civilization only in institutions for mental diseases. They
admitted no salvation without a conviction of sin that prostrated
the victim, sometimes for years, with remorse and terrible
anguish. It was the duty of the minister to put the fear of
hell into the heart of even the youngest child, and to e^ct of
every convert emotional acceptance of his damnation if God
saw fit to damn him. It does not matter where we turn among
the records of New England Puritan churches of this period,
whether to those dealing with witches or with unsaved children
not yet in their teens or with such themes as damnation and
predestination, we are faced with the fact that the group of
people who carried out to the greatest extreme and in the follest
honour the cultural doctrine of the moment are by the slighdy
altered standards of our generation the victims of intolerable
aberrations. From the point of view of a comparative psychiatry
they fall in the category of the abnormal.

200

PATTERNS OF CULTURE

In our own generation extreme forms of ego-gratification
are culturally supported in a similar fashion. Arrogant and
unbridled egoists as family men, as officers of the law and in
business, have been again and again portrayed by novelists and
dramatists, and they are familiar in every community. Like
the behaviour of Puritan divines, their courses of action are
often more asocial than those of the inmates of penitentiaries.
In terms of the suffering and frustration that they spread about
them there is probably no comparison. There is very possibly at
least as great a degree of mental warping. Yet they are entrusted
with positions of great influence and importance and are as a
rule fathers of families. Their impress both upon their own
children and upon the structure of our society is indelible. They
are not described in our manuals of psychiatry because they
are supported by every tenet of our civilization. They are sure
of themselves in real life in a way that is possible only to those
who are oriented to the points of the compass laid down in their
own culture. Nevertheless a future psychiatry may well ransack
our novels and letters and public records for illumination upon a
type of abnormality to which it would not otherwise give credence.
In every society it is among this very group of the culturally
encouraged and fortified that some of the most extreme types
of human behaviour are fostered.

I Social thinking at the present time has no more important
task before it than that of taking adequate account of cultural
relativity. \ In the fields of both sociology and psychology the
implications are fundamental, and modern thought about con-
tacts of peoples and about our changing standards is greatly
in need of sane and scientific direction. The sophisticated
modern temper has made of social relativity, even in the small
area which it has recognized, a doctrine of despair. It has
pointed out its incongruity with the orthodox dreams of per-
manence and ideality and with the individual’s illusions of
autonomy. It has argued that if human experience must give
up these, the nutshell of existence is empty. But to interpret
our dilemma in these terms is to be guilty of an anachronism.
It is only the inevitable cultural lag that makes us insist that
the old must be discovered again in the new, that there is no
solution but to find the old certainty and stability in the new
plasticity. |The recognition of cultural relativity carries with it
its own values,| which need not be those of the absolutist philo-
sophies. It challenges customary opinions and causes those who

THE INDIVIDUAL AND CULTURE

201

have been bred to them acute discomfort. It rouses pessimism
because it throws old formulas into confusion, not because it con-
tains anything intrinsically difficult. As soon as the new opinion
is embraced as customary belief, it will be another trusted bulwark
of the good life. "^We shall arrive then at a more realistic social
faith, accepting as grounds of hope and as new bases for tolerance
the co-existing and equally valid patterns of life which mankind
has created for itself from the raw materials of existence./

REFERENCES

Chapter I

PAGE

9 Itard, Jean-Marc-Gaspard. The Wild Boy of Aveyron, translated by
George and Muriel Humphrey. New York, 1932

It IS probable that some of these children were subnormal and
abandoned because of that fact. But it is hardly possible that ail of
them were, yet they ail impressed observers as half-witted.

II See Boas, Franz. Anthropology and Modern Life^ 18-100. New York,

1932.

Chapter II

18 For an analysis of puberty rites as crisis ceremonialism, Van Gennep,
Arnold Les Rites de Passage Pans, 1909.

21 Mead, Margaret. Coming of Age in Samoa London, 1928.

24 Howitt, A. W. The Native Tribes of South-East Australia, New York,
1904.

28 Benedict, Ruth The Concept of the Guardian Spirit in North America.
Memoirs of the American Anthropological Association, no. 29, 1923.

Chapter III

35 Malinowski, Bronislaw. The Sexual Life of Savages, London, 1929 ;
Argonauts of the Western Pacific, London, 1922 ; Crime and Custom in Savage
Society, London, 1926 , Sex and Repression in Savage Society, London, 1927 ;
Myth in Primitive Psychology, London, 1926

Stern, Wilhelm. Die differentielle Psychologic in ihren Grundlagen. Leipzig,
1921

36 Worrmger, Wilhelm. Form m Gothic London, 1927
Koffka, Kurt. The Growth of the Mind London, 1927
Kohler, Wilhelm Gestalt Psychology London, 1929

For a summary of the work of the Gestalt school see Murphy, Gardner
Approaches to Personality, 3-36 New York, 1932.

37 Dilthey, Wilhelm. Gesammelte Schnften, Band 2 , 8 Leipzig, 19 14-31.
Spengler, Oswald, The Decline of the West, London, 1934.

Chapter IV

41 The traditional spelling, Zuhi, is misleading. The n is pronounced as
m any English word.

The following is a selected bibliography on Zuhi. The references m
this chapter are numbered as m this list
Benedict, Ruth.

1. Zuhi Mythology. Columbia University Contributions to Anthropology,
2 voL, XXI. New York, 1934-

2. Psychological Types in the Cultures of the Southwest. Proceedings
of the Twenty^Third International Congress of Americanists, 572-81, New
York, 1928.

Bunzel, Ruth L.

1. Introduction to Zuhi Ceremonialism. Forty-Seventh Annual Report
of the Bureau of American Ethnology, 467-544. Washington, 1932

2. Zuhi Ritual Poetry. Ibid, 611-835.

202

REFERENCES

203

PAGE

3 Zuni Katchmas Ihid 837-1086.

4 Zunx Texts Publications of the American Ethnological Society, XV.
New York, 1933

Cushing, Frank Hamilton

1 Outlines of Zuni Creation Myths. Thirteenth Annual Report of the
Bureau of American Ethnology Washington, 1926.

2 Zuni Folk Tales. New York, 1901

3. My Experiences in Zuni. The Century Magazine, n.s. 3, 4, 1888.

4 Zuhi Breadstuffs. Publications of the Museum of the American Indian,
Heye Foundation, VI 11 . New York, 1920

5 Zuhi Fetishes Second Annual Report of the Bureau of American
Ethnology Washington, 1883

Kroeber, A L. Zuhi Km and Clan Anthropological Papers of the
American Museum of Natural History, vol. XVIII, part 2. New York,

1917

Parsons, Elsie Clews. Notes on Zuhi, I and II. Memoirs of the American
Anthropological Association, vol 4, no 3, 1927
Stevenson, Matilda Cox

I The Zuhi Indians. Tweniy-'Third Annual Report of the Bureau of
American Ethnology, Washington, 1904.

2. The Religious Life of the Zuhi Child. Ibid, V. Washington,
1887

41 Kidder, A V Southwest Archaeology Yale University Press New
Haven, 1934.

44 Zuhi ritual prayers are recorded m Bunzel 2.

44 Bunzel 2 : 626

45 Bunzel 2 . 689.

46 Bunzel 2 : 645 , 2 : 716
46 Bunzel 2 . 666-7.

See Bunzel, i and 3.

49 Stevenson i 94-107
51 Ibid 407-576

53 For the mildness of Zuhi behaviour upon separation of spouses see,
however, below, p 77, for the fist fight in which two women may engage.
56 Nietzsche, Friedrich The Birth of Tragedy New York, 1924.

56 “ Measure in the Hellenic sense,*’ ibid 40.

57 “ And retains his civic name,” ibid 68

58 Benedict, Ruth. The Vision in Plains Culture. American Anthropologist,

ns 24 . 1-23 1922

61 Reo F Fortune Secret Societies of the Omaha. Columbia University
Contributions to Anthropology, XII. New York, 1932.

Benedict i.

6 1 Lewm, Louis. Uber Anhalonium Lewinii und andere Cacteen. Zweite
Mitteiiung. Separatdruck aus dem Archiv fur experimentelle Patkologie und
Pharmakologie, Bd XXXIV. Leipzig, 1894.

Wagner, Gunther. Entwicklung und Verbreitung des Peyote-Kultes
Bossier Archiv, 15 : 59-144 Hamburg, 1931.

62 Benedict 2

Quotation, Bunzel i * 482.

63 Stevenson, Thirtieth Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, 89.

65 For the Cactus initiation, Cushing 3 (vol. 4) : 31-2.

For the Fire initiation, ibid 30-1 ; Stevenson i : 526

66 D. H. Lawrence. Mornings in Mexico, 109-10. New York, 1928.

67 For the Cora dance upon the altar, Preuss, K. T. Die JSfayant Expedition,
55. Leipzig, 1912.

204

PATTERNS OF CULTURE

PAGE

For the Hopi dance, Voth, H R Oraibi Summer Snake Ceremony
Field Columbian Museum Publication^ no 83, 299 Chicago, 1903
71 Quotations, Bunzel i 480

73 Malinowski, B Sex and Repression in Primitive Society, London, 1927
73 Junod, Henri A Story of a South African Tribe, I 73-92 Neuchatel,
1912 The description is of the Bathonga
75 This folk tale, Benedict i, vol. II (in press), is based on an event that
happened about 1850, and is described by the daughter of the household,
Bunzel 4 * 35-8

77 For a cultural discussion of jealousy, see Mead, Margaret, Jealousy,
Primitive and Modern. In Woman^s Coming of Age, edited by S D
Schmalhausen and V F. Calverton. New York, 1931.

78 Parsons, Elsie Clews. Isleta, New Mexico. Forty^Seventh Annual Report
of the Bureau of American Ethnology, 248-50 , and Goldfrank, Esther
Schiff, MS

80 Prayer to dead wife, Bunzel 2 : 632.

For mourning on the Plains, see Grmnell, George Bird The Cheyenne
Indians, II : 162 Yale University Press, 1923.

80 For the mourner’s reluctance to leave the grave, ibid II * 162

For continued visiting of the grave, Donaldson, Thomas. The George
Gatlin Indian Gallery in the U.S. National Museum, 277
{Smithsonian Institution), Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian
Institution to July, 1885, Part V. Washington, 1886.

For Dakota mourning, Delona, Ella, MS.

81 The quotation is from Denig, Edwin T The Assmiboine, 573. Forty^^
Sixth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, Washington, 1930.

81 For discussion of the aberrant, see below, Chapter VII.

82 Bunzel 2 : 679-83

83 Grmnell, George Bird The Cheyenne Indians, ii . 8-22. New Haven,

1923*

For clowning at the scalp dance, ibid. 39-44.

84 Benedict i.

87 Bourke, John J. Notes on the Cosmology and Theogony of the Mojave
Indians of the Rio Grande, Arizona, 175. Journal of American Folklore,
II (1889), 169-89

88 For instances of Hopi fecundity symbolism, see Haeberlin, H K , The
Idea of Fertilization in the Culture of the Pueblo Indians, 37-46
Memoirs of the American Anthropological Association, III, no i, 1916

89 For the race between men and women in Peru, Arriaga, P J., Extir-
pacion de la Idolatria del Peru, 36, Lima, 1621.

89 For an extreme instance of Zuni misinterpretation see Parsons, Elsie
Clews, Winter and Summer Dance Series in Zuhi in 1918, 199. Um-
versity of California Publications in American Archmlogy and Ethnology, 17,
no. 3, 1922.

Cushing I : 379-81.

90 “ Amiable disciplinary means,” is Dr. BunzePs phrase, Bunzel 3 : 846

91 The quotations are from Bunzel 1 ; 486 ; 497.

92 The quotation concerning Zuhi lack of resignation is from Bunzel
I : 486.

The extracts from the ritual are found in Bunzel 2 : 784 ; 646 ; 807-8

REFERENCES

205

Chapter V

PAGE

94 This chapter is based on the field study, The Sorcerers of Dobu, by Reo F.
Fortune, New York [and London], 1932. The present chapter can be
only an abridgment of Dr Fortune’s full account and to facilitate con-
sultation page references are given on special points
99 For Dobuan totems, Fortune 30-6

100 For the Manus marriage, see Mead, Margaret. Growing up in New
Guinea. London, 1930

104 The quotation is from Fortune 16.

105 For the ritual of the garden, Fortune 106-31.

106 The version given here is condensed See Fortune 139-40.

no For accounts of vada, see Fortune 158-64, and for comparative data,
284-7

in Malinowski, Bronislaw. Argonauts of the Western Pacific London, 1922.
For the economic background of the Kula, Fortune 200-10

114 Fortune 216-17.

115 For mourning observances at the death of a spouse. Fortune n , 57 ,
194.

118 Fortune n, for quotation
118-19 Fortune 197-200.

119 Fortune 23, for statement of sullen suspicion in mourning exchange

120 Fortune 170

120 For this behaviour toward yams. Fortune 222.

122 Fortune 78

122 Fortune 85

123 Fortune 109.

Chapter VI

125 The following is a selected bibliography on the Kwakiutl by Franz
Boas

I. The Social Organization and Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl
Indians, Report of the U.S National Museum for i 8 gj, 311-738. Wash-
ington, 1897.

2 Kwakiutl Texts, by Franz Boas and George Hunt. The Jesup
North Pacific Expedition, III, Memoir of the American Museum of Natural
Hutory. New York, 1905.

3 Ethnology of the Kwakiutl, 2 vols. ThutyTifth Annual Report of the
Bureau of American Ethnology Washington, 1921.

4. Contributions to the Ethnology of the Kwakiutl. Columbia Uni-
versity Contributions to Anthropology, III New York, 1925.

5 The Religion of the Kwakiutl Indians, vol IL Columbia University
Contributions to Anthropology, X. New York, 1930

126 The performances of the secret societies are described in Boas i.

127 Quotation, Boas i : 466.

Ibid. 513 ; 467

127 Ibid. 459.

127-8 For the cannibal dance, ibid. 437”*62 ; 500-44
130 Exorcism, Boas 3 : 1173

135 For the endogamy of the Bella Coola, Boas, Franz The Mythology
of the Bella Coola Indians, 125 Publications of the Jesup North Pacific
Expedition I, 25-127, Memoirs of the American Museum of Natural History.
New York, 1898.

136 “We fight with property.” Boas i • 571.

137-8 Boas 3 . 1291 , 1290 ; 848 ; 857 ; 1281.

2o6

PATTERNS OF CULTURE

PAGE

140 Boas I . 622

14 1- 2 Ibid 346-53

142- 4 Hunt, George, The Rival Chiefs Boas Anniversary Volume^ 108-36
New York, 1906

144 Boas 3 744

Boas I 581

145 Boas 4 165-229

146 Boas I 359 ff , 421 ff

148 Ibid 422

149 Quotation, ibid 424 For the marriage contest, ibid 473

149 Boas 3 1030.

150 Boas I 366

150 Boas 3 1075

15 1 Boas 3 1110-17

15 1 Boas 2 441 etc

152 “ Of the order of spirits,’* Boas 3 740

Demonstrating the privileges of a shaman, Boas 5 18, 30

153 Killing a shamamstic competitor, Boas 5 31-3

153-4 Shamamstic spies, Boas 5 : 15 , 270

Ibid 277-88.

154 Ibid 271

155 The capsized canoe, Boas 4 133.

The broken cannibal mask, Boas i 600
The bankrupt gambler. Boas 2 . 104

156 “ Craziness strikes,” Boas 3 : 709
For this head-hunting. Boas 3 . 1385.

Ibid 1363

156 Boas MS.

158 Boas 3 • 1093-1104

159 Quoted from Mayne Boas, F., Tsimshian Mythology, 545 Thirty-
Fifth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology Washington, 1916
Boas I ; 394

Chapter VII

166 Durkheim, Emile Les Regies de la methode sociologique 6th edition
Pans, igi2

Kroeber, A. L. The Superorgamc American Anthropologist ^ ns, XIX
(1917), 163-213.

For discussion, see Folsom, J R. Social Psychology^ 296 ff New York,

193U

167 For condemnation of the group fallacy, Allport, F H, Social Psychology.
Boston, 1924

167 Rivers, W. H, R. Sociology and Psychology, in Psychology and Ethnology^
London, 1926

170 Murphy, Gardner. Experimental Psychology^ 375,

172-3 Boas 5 , 202 ; Boas 3 , 1309 Sec complete titles under preceding
chapter

175 Westermarck, E A. History of Human Marriage 3 vols 5th edition
London, 1921.

Chapter VHI

182 Sumner, William Graham Folkways Boston, 1907
184 Jones, William Mortuary Observances and the Adoption Rites of the
Algonkm Foxes of Iowa, 271-7 Qumzihme Congris International des
Amencanistes, 273-7. Quebec, 1907.

REFERENCES

207

PAGE

185 For mourning practices of the Plains, see above, p 282,

186 Fortune, R F Sorcerers of Dobu, 54. London, 1932

188 For a native account of this witchcraft incident m Zuni, see Bunzel,
Ruth L Publications of the American Ethnological Society, XV 44-52
New York, 1933

189-90 For description of various Zufii men-women, see Parsons, Elsie Clews
The Zuhi Lamana American Anthropologist, n% 18 (1916), 521-8
For Mis Stevenson’s description of We-wha, Stevenson, Mathilda C
The Zuhi Indians Twenty-Third Annual Report of the Bureau of American
Ethnology, 37 , 310-31 ; 374

190 Delona, Ella, MS

1 9 1-4 From Benedict, Ruth Culture and the Abnormal Journal of
General Psychology, 1934, I, 60-4

192 Dixon, Roland B The Shasta Bulletin of the American Museum of
Natural History, XVII 381-498 New York, 1907

192 For a convenient summary, Czaplicka, M. A Aboriginal Siberia
Oxford, 1914

193 Callaway, Canon H Religious System of the Amazulu. Publications
of the Folklore Society, XV 259 ff London, 1884.

195 Sapir, E , in Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, XXVII (1932), 241

196 Dewey, John Human Nature and Conduct. New York, 1922

197 Lynd, Robert and Helen Middletown New York, 1929

200 Such individuals are favourite subjects in the novels and short stories
of May Sinclair and Tchekhov.

INDEX

Aberrants, 186-97 , Dobu, 186 , Plains
Indians, 187 , Zuni, 188-9
Abnormal, categories of • extreme de-
velopment of cultural type, 199-200 ,
inferiors, 197 , unsupported by their
culture, 186-97

Abnormality, inadequacy of character-
ization by fixed symptoms, 186-200 ,
by inadequate functioning, 198
Adolescence, 17-21 , Apache, 20, 73 ,
Australia, 18, 73 , Carrier, 20 ,

Central Africa, 19 , Kwakiutl, 146 ,
Nandi (East Africa), 19 , Plains
Indians, 18 , Plateau of British
Columbia, 19 , Samoa, 21 , Western
civilization, 17 , Zuhi, 49-50, 65, 73
Africa, Central Africa, adolescence, 19 ,
Nandi, adolescence, 1 9 , South Africa,
adolescence, 73 , South Africa,
shamanism, 193-4
Allport, F H , 167
Analytical studies m anthropology, 34
Anthropology, analytical studies in,
34 , comparative studies m, 1 74 ;
configuration studies in, 165 , defini-
tion of, I , functional studies in, 35 ,
individual vs culture, 181-3 , pre-
liminary propositions of, 3-7 , typo-
logical studies in, 171-2 ; value in
social sciences, 12-13
Apache, adolescence, 20, 73 , alcohol,
64 ; punishment of wife’s infidelity,
77

Apollonian, 57
Art and rehgion, 27
Australia, adolescence, 18, 73 , be-
haviour at death, 85 , marriage m,

24

Authority, right to exercise, Zuhi, 71-4
Aztecs, 61 ; self-torture, 64 ; use of
datura, 62, 63 y war, 22

Bella Goola, 136

Biological inheritance in behaviour,
168-70; ants, 9; man, 8-n
Blake, William, 56

British Columbia, plateau of, adoles-
cence, 19 ; lack of cultural integra-
tion, 161-2 ; religion, 28
Bimzel, Ruth, 47, 49, 71, 77, 91

California, shamanism, 30, 66, 19 1-2
See also Mission Indians
Cannibahsm, 94, -iiB, 128-9
Capitalism, Western civilization, 180
Carrier Indians, adolescence, 20
Cervantes, 195

Clan, Dobu, 95-6, 98 ; Northwest
Coast, 134 , Zuhi, 54, 56, 72, 75
Closed group and the alien, 5
Comparative school in anthropology,
174, 176

Crow Indians, 187

Cultural change, control of, 196 , fears
of, 26 , inevitability of, 7 , technique
of control, 179-80

Culture, as an organism, 166-7 , bio-
logical interpretation of, 168-70 ,
historical factors in, 167-8, 170 ,

importance of, 1-2 , integration of,
33 j 34> 1 > psychological mtei-
pretation of, 25, 167-8 , selection m,
i7> 33 ; variety m, 2 , and the indi-
vidual, 181-201
Custom See Culture

Dakota, homosexuality, 190 , mournmg,
80

Dance, Hopi, 67 , Kwakiutl, 66, 126-30 ,
Maidu, California, 66 , Northern
Mexico, 66, 67 , Northwest Coast,
66 , Zuni, 66 , absence of, Dobu, 96 ,
Ghost Dance of American Indians, 66
Darwin, 3, 39
Datura, 62, 63

Death, behaviour at, 175-6 , Aus-
tralia, 85 , Central Algonkian, 184 ;
Dobu, 115-19, Kwakiutl, 155-7,
172 , Navajo, 86 , Plains Indians,
80-1 , Pueblo, 78, 86 , Zuhi, 79,
86, 175

Dewey, John, 196
Diffusion, 174
Dll they, Wilhelm, 37
Dionysian, 56-7, 126, 13 1
Divination, Dobu, 95, 123 , Zuhi, 62
Divorce, Dobu, 100 ; Kwakiutl, 150 ,
Zuhi, 53, 78

Dobu, 94-124 , aberrant individual,
186, cannibalism, 94, 118, clan,
95^6, 98 ; consistency m cultural
behaviour, 172 , death, behaviour at,
1 15-19, 175; divination, 95, 123,
dourness, 120 , economic life, 94,
100-2, 105-6, no-15, 117-18, frus-
tration, behaviour at, 184 ; govern-
ment, 95, 122 , homicide, 1 10, 1 19-20 ,
ideal chatacter, 102, 121, 124, 180 ;
Kula ring, in -15, 123, legality,
122-3, niagic, 95, 102-10, 112-16,
123, marriage, 96-102, 115, 12 1 ,
medicine charms, 107-10, 116, mo-
ther’s brother, 99, 102, 104 ; personal
names, use of, 99 , religion, 102-10,

208

INDEX

113-14, sex, 99-100, 106, 1 20-1 ,
sorcery, 94, 95, 96, 109-10 , suicide,
100, 125 , supernaturals, 102-3 ,

totems, 99 , villages, 95-6, 101-2 ,
war, 95, wabuwabu, 114-15
Drugs and religion, 61-4
Dualisms m social theory, 18 1
Durkheim, 166

Economic laws, 178

Economic life, 175 , Dobu, 94, 100-2,
105, 1 10-15, 117-18 ; Kwakiutl, 125-
6, 131-4. 136, 139-52 j Zuni, 45, 46,
55, 75-6

Evolution, 3 , m anthropological theory,
13-14

Fasting and religion, 63
Fertility cult, Hopi, 88 , Peru, 89 ;
Zum, 88

Fortune, R F, 100, 104, 109, 119, 123
Frazer, The Golden Bough, 34
Frustration, behaviour at, 184-5

Gestalt school in psychology, 36
Government, Dobu, 94-5, 122 , Kwa-
kiutl, 132, 133 , Zuhi, 71-2
Greece, 57, 172, 189
Group fallacy, 166

Head-hunting, Kwakiutl, 156-7
Homicide, 32, Dobu, no, 119,
Eskimo, 184 , Kwakiutl, 149, 15 1,
152 ; Zum, 84

Homosexuality, American Indians, 189 ;
Dakota, 190-1 ; Greece, 189 ; West-
ern civilization, 189, 191 , Zum, 190
Hopi, fertility magic, 88 ; snake dance,
67

Ideal character, Dobu, 102, 12 1-4, 180 ;
Kwakiutl, 144, 155, 156, 180 , Plains,
70 , Zum, 71
Incest groups, 23

Inconsistencies m cultural behaviour,
Dobu, 172 , Kwakiutl, 172-4, West-
ern civilization, 1 72, 1 74 , Zum, 1 74
Individual, malleability of, 8i, 183 ,
and society, 181-201
Integration, emphasis upon m psychol-
ogy, 35 , in social studies, 36-7
Integration, cultural, 16, 33, 34, 161 ;
lack of, 161-3 ; Western civilization,
165-6

Intoxication, religious, 61
Isleta, 78, 86

Jealousy, marital, Dobu, 100 , Zuhi, 77

Kroeber, A, L , 166
Kula ring, Dobu, 1 11-15, 123
Kwakiutl, 125-160 ; adolescence, girls’,
146 , bear dance, 127 ; cannibal

209

dance, 128-31 , cannibalism, 128 ,
cultural integration, historical, 163-5 j
dances, 126-31 , death, behaviour at,
I55"*7 j 172? 175 , economic life, 125-6,

1 3 1-4, 135-6, 139-52 ; evaluation
of culture, 177-9 > frustration, be-
haviour at, 184 , head -hunting, 1 56-7 ,
homicide, 149, 152, 153 , ideal

character, 144, 154, 159, 160, 186,
inconsistencies in cultural behaviour,
172-3 , marriage, 125, 134, 146-51,
15S, 159; potlatch, 126, 133-4, 137,
138, 141-52 , psychiatric view of,
186 , religion, 126-31, 152-4, 159-60 ,
rivalry, 136-46, 153-4 > shamanism,
152-4, 158, shame, 155-60; social
organization, 131-5 , suicide, 155,
157, 158-9 , supematurals, 159 ,

titular names, 132-5, 136

Lawrence, D H , 66-7
Lowie, R H, 187

Magic, Dobu, 95, 102-10, 112-16, 123 ,
Zuhi, 43-4
Maidu, California, 66
Malinowski, B , 35, 73, 94, 1 1 1
Manus, 100

Marriage, 175 , and economic transfer,
31 , and religion, Western civiliza-
tion, 31 , asocial developments of,
Australia, 24 , Dobu, 96-102, 1 15-21 ,
Dutch New Gumea, 98 , Kwakiutl,
125-6, 134, 135, 146-51, 158 ; Zufii,
52-3, 72-3, 75, 77, 79
Mead, Margaret, 21
Medicme, charms, Dobu, 107-10, 116;

societies, Zuhi, 51, 52
Menstruation, Zuhi, 86
Mental hygiene, Western civilization,
176, 196-8

Mexico, Northern, religious use of
alcohol, 61 , whirling dance, 67-8.
See also Aztecs
Middletown, 178, 197
Mission Indians, California, adoles-
cence, 74 ; proverb of, 15, use of
datura, 62 , war, 22
Mojave, shamanism and sorcery, 87 ;
use of datura, 62

Navajo, mourning, 86
Nietzsche, 56

Northwest Coast, dance, 66 , preroga-
tives, 164 See also Kwakiutl

CEdipus complex, Zuhi, 73
Orgy, traces m Zuhi, 89
Osage, totemism among, 29

Penitentes, 64-5

Personality differences within a culture,
182-3

210

INDEX

Peyote, 6i, 64 !

Pima, purification of slayer, 83 ; re-
ligious intoxication, 61
Plains Indians, aberrant individual,
187 ; adolescence, 18 , behaviour at
death, 80-1, 185 , homosexuality,

1 90 , ideal of character, 70 , Omaha,

61 , purification of slayer, 83 , self- t
torture, 64 , shamanism, 69-70 , i
suicide, 85 , the vision, 58 , toteraism, I
Osage, 29 I

Plato, 189

Potlatch, Kwakiutl, 126, 133-4, 137,
138, 141-52

Primitive, romantic return to the, 14
Primitive societies, value of as social
laboratory, 12-14, 39
Psychiatry, 185 ; and psychotic types, 35
Psychological origins of culture, 168
Psychology, experimental, 1 70 ; in-
tegration studies in, 36 , and culture, .
25

Pueblos, behaviour at death, 78, 86 , 1
prehistory of, 41. See also Zuni ‘

Purification of slayer, Pima, 83 , Plains !

Indians, 83 , Zuhi, 8r
Puritanism, 199 ; Dobu, 121 ; Western |
civilization, 90 ; Zuhi, 90 j

Race and culture, 167-70 "

Race prejudice, 6, 8, ii, 31 |

Racial mheritance, ii
Rasmussen, K , 22

Religion, the closed group and the alien '
m, 6 , and adolescence, 28 , and !
art, 27 ; and dance 66-8 ; and j
drugs, 61 ; and economic exchange,
31 , and feasting, 63 ; and intoxica- j
tion, 61 , and marriage, 31 ; and self-
torture, 64-5 ; and social organiza-
tion, 28 , and shamanism, 69 ; and
trance, 30, Dobu, 102-10, 1 12-14,
Kwakiutl, 126-30, 152-4, 159 , Pima,
61 , Plains Indians, 58 ; Zuni, 42-52,
160 , shamanism and sorcery, 87
Rivalry, 177-8 ; Kwakiutl, 136-46,

152-4

Rivers, W. H. R., 167

Salish, 163, 164
Samoa, adolescence, 21
Sapir, E., 195

Selection, in art forms, 33 ; in cultural
configurations, 171, 183 ; in cultural
forms, t7, 33 , in Imguistic forms,
16-17

Self-torture, Aztec, 64 ; Penitentes,
64-5 ; Plains Indians, 64 , Zuni, 65
Sense of sin. Western civilization, 90 ;
Zum, 90

Sex, Dobu, 99, 100, 106, I20-I ;

Kwakiutl, 173 , Zuhi, 52-4, 72,
77-8, 80, 89-90, 1 21

Sexual symbolism, Zuhi, 89-90
Shamanism, 69-70 , and sorcery, Mo-
jave, 87 , California, 30 , Kwakiutl,
152-4, 158 , Shasta Indians, 30,

1 91-2 , Siberia, 193 , Zulu, 193-4
Shasta, 30, 19 1-2

Siberia, religious art, 27 , shamanism,

Snake dance, Hopi, 67
Social organization, 23-5 , Dobu, 94-6,
98 , Kurnai, Australia, 24 , Kwakiutl,
131-5 , Osage, 28 ; Zuhi, 52, 54, 56,

72 - 3 » 75

Sorcery, Dobu, 95-6 ,
86

North America,

South America, adolescence, 73 , re-
ligious art, 27
Spengler, Oswald, 37
Stern, Wilhelm, 36
Struktur school in psychology, 36
Suicide, 32 , Dobu, 100, 124 , Kwakiutl,
^ 55 j i 57"9 > Plains Indians, 85,

Zuhi, 84

Supernaturals, Dobu, 103 , Kwakiutl,
159 , Zuni, 48, 51, 91, 92

Taos, peyote in, 64
Totenusm, Dobu, 99 ; Osage, 29
Trance, 191-4 ; Shasta Indians, 30
Trobnand Islands, 94, iii, 116
Typology in cultural studies, 171

Utopias, 179

Value, problem of, 177-80
Vision, the, m North America, 28-31,
58-66, 69, 70 , Kwakiutl, 128, 153

War, Aztecs, 22 ; Dobu, 95 , Eskimo,
22 , Mission Indians of California,
22 ; Plains Indians, 70 , Western
civilization, 22-3, 32, 180

Westermarck, 175

Western civilization, aberrant in-
dividuals, 187, 195 ; adolescence, 17 ;
art and religion, 27 ; artists, 187 ;
attitudes toward children, 176-7 ,
behaviour at death, 185 , capitalism,
180 ; cultural integration, 165 ; eco-
nomics, 25-6 ; ego extensions, 176 ;
ego-gralification, 200 , forms of, not
biologically conditioned, 25-6 ; hobos,
187 , homosexuality, 189, 191 , in-
consistencies m behaviour, 172 ;
inferiority complex, 197 ; integration
in, 37 , intolerance, 197-8 , marriage
and religion, 31 ; mental hygiene,
176, 196-7 , position of women and
Christianity, 31 ; possibility of cul-
tural control, 179-80, 195-6 , para-
noia, 160 ; Puritan divines, 199 ;
puritamsm, 90 ; race and prejudice,

INDEX

2II

31, religion, 179, rivalry, 178-9,
sanity in, 1 7 1 , spread over world, 4 ,
trance, 191 , war, 22, 180
Wild children of the Middle Ages, 9
Witchcraft, Pueblo, 87, 91
Women, position of, and Christianity, 31
Woi ringer, W , 36

Zuhi, 4 1 --93 ; aberrant individual,
188-9 , adolescence, 49-50, 65, 73 ,
Apollonian type, 57 , authority, 71-4 ,
authority in the family, 72 , clan,
54 j 72, 75 » crime, 72 , dance,

66 , datura, 63 ; death, behaviour
at, 79, 86, 1 75 , death of spouse, 79 ;
divination, 63 , divorce, 53, 78 ,
economic life, 52, 53, 55, 75 , evalu-
ation of culture, 177 , fasting, 63 ,
fertility cult, 88, 89 , frustration,
behaviour at, 184 , good and evil,
91 , government, 71-2 , group sanc-
tion, 74-6 , homicide, 84 , homo-

sexuality, 189-90 , ideal of character,
71 , initiation, 49, 65, 73 , intoxica-
tion, 64 , kachina cult, 48-51 ,
magical technique, 43 , marriage,
52, 72, 75, 77, 79 , medicine societies,
51-2 , menstruation, 86 , modera-
tion in emotional life, 76, 86, 175 ,
CEdipus complex, 73 , orgy, traces
of, 89 , prayer, 44 , priests, 46-7, 87 ,
priest, character of the, 69 , psy-
chiatric view of, 185 , purification of
the slayer, 81 , puntanism, 90 ,
religion, 43-52, i6o , religion, object
of, 45 , religious art, 27 ; resignation,
92 , ritual, importance of, 42-3 ,
sense of sin, 90 , sex, 52-4, 72, 77-8,
80, 89-90, 121 , sexual symbolism,
89-90 , self-torture, 65 , shamanism,
absence of, 69 , social organization,
52, 54. 56. 72-3. 75. suicide, 84,
supernaturals, 48, 51, 91, 92 ; wealth,
55 , witchcraft, 87, 91